A romp through royal hits and misses

You might well expect a royal documentary on Channel 5 to be unashamedly gossipy. You might also expect it to go for the simultaneous possession and eating of cake — lamenting the endless scrutiny the poor Windsors are subject to, while adding a fair amount of its own. What you mightn’t expect, however, is for the presenter to be Jeremy Paxman.

But in Paxman On The Queen’s Children all three things are true. Stranger still, the result is undeniably enjoyable, thanks largely to Paxo himself, who comes across rather as Robert De Niro did in films like Meet the Fockers: as a man who, after decades of the serious stuff, is visibly having fun slumming it for a while.

In Tuesday’s first episode, which reached the annus horribilis of 1992, Paxman began by solemnly pointing out that ‘To be royal is to be watched from the moment you’re born.’ And to prove it, he then got down to the main business of watching Charles, Anne, Andrew and Edward from the moment they were born. His thesis — if that’s not too grand a word for what was essentially a romp through the Windsors’ greatest hits and misses — is that early in the Queen’s reign, the Palace made a fateful decision. To retain the postwar good will towards the Royals, the family would place her children in the public eye so as to charm us all. The trouble was that for this plan to work, they needed to make no mistakes in the course of their lives.

Throughout the programme, Paxman did a fine job of reminding us just how weird being royal is. Most people, for example, don’t have their higher education mapped out by the prime minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Louis Mountbatten at a parental dinner party.