Sue Townsend

(On Cable TV, September 2022) I often don’t care for films, or remain unmoved by them—but it’s far rarer that I’ll go out of my way to outright hate a movie. And I suppose that low-budget British comedy The Queen and I is a weird choice for a hateable film—it’s meant as an innocuous satire, after all. But as I write this, the world is in the middle of a ten-day mourning period commemorating the life and reign of Elizabeth II: clearly, the broadcast of The Queen and I isn’t accidental. On the other hand, it’s a terrible film. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trashing the film because of some excessive attachment to the crown (I am, at best, a lukewarm procedural monarchist). It’s just that there’s a line between satire and stupidity, and The Queen and I crosses it early and never looks back. A TV movie adapted from a 1992 novel by Sue Townsend, the film takes place in an alternate timeline where hard-core republicans have been elected in the United Kingdom, and the Royal Family finds itself destitute, forced to move in low-cost housing and interact with the real world as the ruling party systematically dismantles the British state. That, by itself, is ludicrous (never mind the constitutional crisis—although the recent history of United Kingdom politics suggests that no scenario is too weird or too dumb) but not necessarily fatal. Still: aren’t we aware of just how filthy rich the British royals are? What is fatal and brings me in the haters’ camp is just how cheap and moronic the production is—working with a clearly inadequate budget and a script that seems to have escaped from a feverish hack’s/trash/folder, The Queen and I doesn’t have either the wit or the budget to do justice to its own satirical material. The royal family is a rough ersatz of how it looked in the early 1992 (hence a much younger Elizabeth, Queen Mother, Charles and the William/Harry brothers) and I suppose you can’t blame the actors for grabbing a paycheque when they can (except for David Walliams as the caricatural republican prime minister—he’s terrible and he should know it), but there’s no excuse for a script so mind-bogglingly awful that I checked several times that this wasn’t meant to be for a grade-school audience. (But no: it was a Christmas special, but one aimed at adults.)  The shoddy production values undermine everything else, and the cheap ending is an arbitrary reset button that restores the monarchy in place, despite them not proving to be worth anything. Well, except for the Queen herself (played by veteran Samantha Bond):  There’s a reason why her passing is much mourned, and that her absence is expected to re-shape public opinion of the crown. Although if they keep rerunning The Queen and I, audiences are liable to hate both the monarchy and the republicans.