Yeah, I know, it’s tough livin’ in the age o’ Trump, and, particularly, livin’ in the land o’ Trump, and the temptation to crack a forty before noon weighs heavily on a lot of us, but stiff that desire, friends, there’s a better way: The Windsors, the low-comedy antithesis and antipodes to the much lamented (by me) Netflix colossus, The Crown. So let the Olde English chill in the cooler until at least 6 pm whilst you chuckle over the antics of those lunatic backstabbing inbreds, the Windsors, the brainchild of Bert Tyler-Moore (no relation, I think) and George Jeffrie.
The Windsors has been criticized for its affection for the obvious, and it’s true that a lot of the jokes were probably stolen from Bill Mahr’s riffs on West Virginia hillbillies, but the difference is, the British royal family deserves the hits, because they’re true!
Since I’ve studiously learned as little as possible about the real royals, I’m a bit lost when it comes to “Harry” (Richard Goulding) and “Kate” (Louise Ford), who are more or less the center of the show, though I’ve finally figured out that Harry is the eldest son of “Charles” (Harry Enfield), who is the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, and thus Harry is important because he’s next in line after Charlie, if Liz II ever dies, the old bitch.1 I recall the fuss about Kate and Harry getting married a few years ago, but, as I say, I refused to learn anything about them, so I had some catching up to do. There are a lot of jokes about Kate being a gypsy, which might not be so funny if I understood the whole gypsy thing in England.2
Also puzzling were perhaps my two favorite royals, “Beatrice” (Ellie White) and “Eugenie” (Celeste Dring), two Valley Girl-style royals trying to bust it big on YouTube, though failing miserably. I finally figured out that they’re the daughters of “Fergie”, whom I actually remember, who unfortunately is kind of screwed because she’s no longer a royal, since she’s divorced, though fortunately her daughters don’t “cut” her.3 Fergie was married to “Prince” Andrew—this took me a really long time to figure out—not very important since he’s Charles’ younger brother, so Beatrice and Eugenie aren’t important at all, unless an awful lot of people die. Since the British royal family is the only one that still has a decent castle, there’s no one Bea & Eu can marry who’s worth a damn, except maybe someone in the Japanese imperial family, and my guess is that’s not going to happen.
To loop back a bit, my favorite next to Bea & Eu is Charles’ wife, the rather pathetic, and all the more bitter for it, Camilla (Haydn Gwynne), with no children to speak of (in the line of succession, that is), and permanently doomed to live in the shadow of “Princess” Di, who, unlike some dead royals, has yet to show up as a ghost. Camilla’s constant malevolence, chained as it is to the service of her idiot husband Charles—for without him she’d be nothing—burns all the more fiercely for its ignominious captivity. Charles has at least the saving grace of his own bigoted self-importance, telling his various offspring and other relatives “Here’s the thing: I’m going to be King! That’s all I know, and it’s all you need to know! So shut the fuck up! And while you’re at it, bugger the fuck off!”
Some of the jokes can be a little recondite, though I did get the one about King Alfred letting the cakes burn. All the hip pop cultural references, of course, are past me entirely, but who needs to know everything? And, anyway, it’s such a relief to laugh at some other nation’s stupidities! “The Trumps”, I fear, would hit too close to home.
- If you’re as old as I am, you can remember the “real” Liz II, Elizabeth Ray, who zoomed around DC back in the seventies in a Corvette with the license plate “Liz II”, though she was referencing (of course) Elizabeth Taylor rather than the Tudor chick. Liz was the non-working (during the day) secretary to Wayne Hays, a forgotten Capitol Hill autocrat whose power stemmed from his control of the all-powerful House Administration Committee. If you pissed off Wayne, he’d turn off the air conditioning in your office. ↩︎
- It’s supposed to be funny that they’re losers, more or less. Europeans in general seem to have a hard time understanding our American discomfort (some of the time) at laughing at people who aren’t like us. I recently saw a video of a German performance of The Magic Flute circa 1992 in which the singer playing Monostatos is made up in blackface so “innocently”, and so ignorantly, racist that the date might have been 1892. ↩︎
- When I was in college I read the autobiography of no longer famous English poet Edith Sitwell. Edith’s mum was frequently depressed, because she felt she’d married beneath herself, and she would take it out on Edith, telling her scornfully, “I am better born than you!” ↩︎
