Right royal triumph

The King’s Speech is a joy, and I adore it.

The King’s Speech is a joy, and I adore it. In fact, I love it so much that, if I could, I would take it home and put it down for a good school and wrap it up warm in the cold and, should it catch a chill, I would nurse it and offer hot lemon and maybe even oxtail soup, which is actually quite disgusting, but always appealing when you are sickly, for some reason. Yes, it’s a full-blown heritage crowd-pleaser and, yes, the banter between the king and his speech therapist is too snappily arch to be even remotely naturalistic and, yes, it probably is too enamoured of its royal characters, but you know what? I don’t care. And should you ever raise such matters again, I will take that ox tail out of the soup and whip you about the face with it. Good; I think we all know where we stand now.

The film is based on the true but little-known story of George VI (Colin Firth), his profoundly debilitating stammer, and Leonard ‘Lionel’ Logue (Geoffrey Rush), the speech therapist who helped him and became his friend, perhaps his only friend. If Alan Bennett and Peter Morgan were to ever, say, go on a mini-break to a country-house hotel, this is, I imagine, just the sort of film they would come back with, along with the Molton Brown toiletries from the bathroom, and possibly the dressing-gowns. (They both seem the type.) As it is, it’s directed by Tom Hooper (who directed Morgan’s The Damned United) but written by David Seidler, a screenwriter who was a stutterer in his youth, and had long wished to put this story on screen.