Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, finesses a sponge cake with her make-up artist, Daniel Martin, in With Love, Meghan.
This week, you have either studiously, or unknowingly, ignored Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s new eight-episode Netflix series, With Love, Meghan, or lapped up every second of its homemade jam, pink peonied, cute-beagle-in-a-basket-chewing-a-treat delirium.
The excitement surrounding the show, buoyed by the inexplicable fervour of pro and against-Meghan camps, fills the airwaves.
But this is not our first behind-British-royal-curtain rodeo, folks.
Meghan’s show, shot on a California estate in Montecito and featuring its co-creator cooking, gardening, writing thank-you cards and extracting honey from a beehive, with guests including Korean-American chef Roy Choi, actor Mindy Kaling and US chef and restaurateur Alice Waters, follows a long line of real-life entertainment featuring people descended from a 10th century chap called Athelstan, considered the first king of England.
The Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix show, With Love, Meghan, is only the latest in a long line of reality-esque shows starring royals.
Yes, Megan and Prince Harry were interviewed by Oprah Winfrey (with more than 50 million viewers) and there was Harry and Megan in 2022, which still holds the record for the biggest debut of a Netflix documentary, with 81.55 million hours viewed.
But who can forget the 1987 television event, It’s a Royal Knockout?
Also known as The Grand Knockout Tournament, this was a charity show featuring large-sized obstacle courses, physical competitions and the unfettered heart-in-the-right-place-but-should-it-ever-have-happened enthusiasm of Prince Edward, its creator and organiser.
Harry and Meghan as they appeared in the Oprah interview.Credit: AP
Starring the Princess Royal, the Duke and Duchess of York, Prince Edward and a clutch of four other dukes, It’s a Royal Knockout was considered a resounding failure by TV critics, who mainly felt it showed a lack of decorum.
But why? Well, members of the royal family, and a band of celebrities, broadcasters and entertainers (John Travolta, Rowan Atkinson, Meat Loaf, Tom Jones, Cliff Richard and many more), dressed as minstrels, damsels or jesters.
Costumes were medieval dress, with heads swathed in feathered caps or conical princess hats, arms mutton-sleeved and pantaloons and layered skirts wide, foofed and satiny.
Competitors, sometimes dressed as leeks and turnips, sometimes dressed in padded armour or rotund kilt costumes, threw themselves across greasy poles, rolled logs on difficult terrain or banded together to drag fake jousting horses.
Prince Edward and co. cheered their teams with chants and battle cries.
Princess Anne, by then an actual Olympic medallist and bearing an expression suggesting she wished to be anywhere else as soon as possible, declared of her Red Team: “We’re the strong silent types.”
Then asked if she had a “war-cry”, she replied in even tones: “No, no, I told you, we’re the strong and silent type.”
It’s a Royal Knockout was seen by more than 400 million viewers globally and raised more £1.5 million (about $A9 million today) for charity.
Prince Edward reportedly left a post-games media gathering in high dudgeon because the assembled journalists seemed unimpressed (mainly because they had not properly seen the games events).
Apart from the sheer spectacle of royals and famous people cheering on competitive root vegetables, this is the compelling part: unfettered human emotion.
Viewers inclined towards royalty reality entertainment live for anyone with access to castles and crowns worn at special dinners appearing to get a bit shirty. Or looking silly. Or smooching each other. Or doing anything that is not a long, slow, serious formal procession (although they’re pretty popular, too).
Stickybeaks want to know what it’s really like when you’re born to rule a portion of the world, whether it’s the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands or Japan.
It’s the same with Royal Family, a 105-minute British TV documentary that aired in 1969 on the BBC and ITV.
Queen Elizabeth II commissioned the documentary to commemorate Charles’ investiture as prince of Wales, but the idea came from William Heseltine, then the royal press secretary.
Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II fly back from a visit to Yorkshire during the filming of the documentary, Royal Family, in 1969.Credit: United Press International
Nearly 400 million people worldwide, including three-quarters of the British population, tuned in to see the queen going about her daily at-desk work, having lunch in Buckingham Palace, choosing future outfits and feeding carrots to her horses after the Trooping of the Colour.
But perhaps more compelling was seeing then-prince Charles chopping lettuce and Prince Philip on the tongs at a barbecue at Balmoral. And the queen buying Prince Edward an ice-cream at a local grocery store.
“This disgusting gooey mess is going to be in the car, isn’t it,” the queen said, paying for the treat with coins from her purse. The storekeeper smiled calmly, as if this occurrence was just another day.
In a 2002 documentary about her mother, Princess Anne, never one to mince words, recalled the film succinctly.
“I never liked the idea of the Royal Family film. I always thought it was a rotten idea,” she said. “The attention that had been brought on one ever since one was a child, you just didn’t want any more. The last thing you needed was greater access.”
Princess Anne with Michael Parkinson (left) and Captain Mark Phillips in 1983.
However, the Princess Royal may also have started another trend: royal family members as guests on TV shows.
In 1983, Princess Anne and her then-husband, Captain Mark Phillips, appeared on Michael Parkinson’s show, Parkinson in Australia, with Princess Anne discussing her kidnapping attempt in 1974. More recently, Prince Harry was a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
In a similar vein, King Charles III made a guest appearance on BBC One’s The Repair Shop in 2022, bringing along a damaged clock and vase for the scrutiny of host Jay Blades and team.
“Wait a minute, are you on the tools?” Blades said, noticing Charles had a pair of pruning shears, which he then confessed to carrying everywhere.
Three years beforehand, the late queen’s granddaughter, Zara Tindall, and her husband, Mike Tindall, appeared on Top Gear, having a red-hot go on the test track (they hit a grassy verge).
In 2022, Mike Tindall appeared on the UK version of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here, where he dealt with spiders, drank a noni fruit (or “vomit fruit”) smoothie, and recalled accidentally revealing his underpants, inscribed with “Nibble My Nuts”, to his mother-in-law.
So be glad that With Love, Meghan is about building tiered sponge cakes and pouring olive oil on fish, and freezing edible flowers inside ice cubes. No one’s making you watch it and there’s not a medieval jester in sight.
With Love, Meghan is now streaming on Netflix.
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