Some might say that the timing of the launch of King Charles’s documentary was unfortunate. Here is a serious film with a serious message — a heartfelt plea from Charles for humanity to mend its broken relationship with nature and save the planet. Yet it landed in the same week that the Epstein files belched out a photograph of his buffoonish brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor barefoot and on all fours over a prone young woman. It might have been done in jest, but it made him look like a creepy uncle and reportedly got him booted out of Royal Lodge earlier than planned and “under the cover of darkness”.
This was bad. But also in the news we read that one of the UK’s worst illegal waste tips, in Bickershaw, Wigan, is on land partially owned by… well, this is awkward… the Duchy of Lancaster, the King’s private estate. So, yes, the timing of a film about the environment could have been happier.
But could these tawdry Epstein revelations help Charles? They do at least underscore in neon lights the canyon-sized difference between him and Andrew. Although brothers, they are like chalk and cheese, organic soil tiller versus playboy vulgarian, homme sérieux versus clown-shoed dimwit.
Charles worries about nature, Andrew worries about himself. Could you imagine Andrew cooing to his chickens, and keeping them in a coop called Cluckingham Palace, as Charles does? Could you imagine him standing in a field looking mildly heartbroken that he doesn’t hear cuckoos and grasshoppers any more, as we see Charles doing? Given the allegations, one imagines the only birds for whom Andrew would be scanning the horizon would be ones wearing skinny jeans and fake smiles.
Anyway, after watching Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision you are left in no doubt of the utter sincerity of Charles’s concern for nature and our disconnect from it. We are a part of nature, not apart from it, is the mantra.
Charles presents as something of a Cassandra figure. He has been warning the world about the environment, pesticides, global warming and so on for decades, but originally people dismissed him as a batty, bumbling eccentric or a pseudo hippy, especially in the 1980s when he admitted that he talked to his plants.
• King Charles: I must help the planet before I die
“A-loon with his worms” read one headline shown in the film. Another newspaper wrote, “The Prince of Wales is going completely off his trolley.” We see him sitting alone on a red velvet chair before a large screen watching his own film, his own life, these headlines looming into view.
The narrator Kate Winslet tells us that what was once considered “crazy now seems like common sense”. It seems to give Charles little satisfaction to have been right. He is frustrated that things have moved so slowly and with such little sense of urgency. “I can only do what I can do, which is not very much. Aaah, anyway…” he sighs, wistfully.
Charles at Highgrove House in 1986
TIM GRAHAM PHOTO LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES
Still, at least we learn that he finds the “Duke of York” useful for something — namely, baked potatoes. Alas, Charles wasn’t talking about his brother’s culinary skills, or about Andrew and his former title at all. He was referring to red Duke of York potatoes, which he said were ideal for making nice, crispy skins. Then he gave a little snigger. Was this all deliberate mischief-making? A not-so-coded dig? Maybe it was all perfectly innocent, but I would like to think not.
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The repetition of the word “harmony” begins to sound a little cultish and some might see irony in the programme being on Prime Video, thus linked to Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, whose enthusiastic use of packaging has been a customer beef. But it is a decent, gentle film that Charles surely intended to be his historical document, a flag in the sand to say, “Look, this is what I am about,” to showcase his gravitas.
I do feel a little sorry for him that Andrew’s Epstein-related escapades have stolen the headlines and the thunder, especially since it is so important to Charles that that the film was given the first premiere to be held at a royal residence, namely Windsor Castle. So, in summary, nice film… shame about the brother.
Can a spelling bee really call itself a spelling bee when one of the words contestants have to spell is, and I kid you not, “bill”? And another is, seriously, “green”. That isn’t a spelling test! It’s a check to see if you are a minimally sentient being.
But here’s the funny thing. Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee on BBC3 was daft and ridiculously easy, but it was more entertaining to watch than Secret Genius, Channel 4’s new serious IQ show whose games are designed with Mensa. Montgomery, a comedian from New Zealand, really is funny and with his panel of comedians it is a test of their quick wit and repartee, and not really spelling at all.
Alan Carr and Susie Dent present Secret Genius
JACK BARNES/CHANNEL 4.
Secret Genius, meanwhile, is a serious test of IQ and is presented by Alan Carr and Susie Dent, which is promising (prepare to see a lot more of Carr on TV after his victory in The Celebrity Traitors). Most of the tasks are challenging and the contestants are nice, shy, introverted, geeky types, which makes a pleasant change from the shouty, pouty, extroverted “Make me an influencer!” characters we see so often on TV shows. But the tests don’t really translate into interesting television, unfortunately.
The first, for example, showed us a board covered in letters. Every month of the year could be spelt from those letters except one and they had to work out which. The trouble is that having seen the first person perform the task while doing it ourselves (it was pretty easy tbh) we then had to sit and watch the others do the same, one by one. Which dragged.
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Some of the memory games were very hard, but once you have seen one contestant try to remember scoops of different flavoured ice cream in order, plus the number of wafers, you’ve seen them all.
Far more interesting were the contestants. Normally I yawn through people’s backstories, but these were not scripted and set to music and told us something important about the untapped potential of ordinary people.
They came from all walks of life — there was a tree surgeon, a shepherd, a hotel receptionist, a 999 emergency call handler, a dance teacher — but they all had a nerdish gift. Many were bullied at school; some you could see had zero self-esteem even as adults and even though IQ-wise they towered above most. In an age when preening self-promotion is lauded, these people made refreshing viewing. They should make a show about them. Nice contestants, shame about the tests.
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