The TV Week said the documentary screening at 2pm on TV One on Queen's Birthday Monday was Ten Days That Made the Queen.
There was nothing for it then but to break out the jewellery box, and sling on the pearls, even though, strictly speaking, they are not supposed to be worn before 5pm.
Made to celebrate the Queen's 80th birthday, the documentary was a little out of date, but just the ticket for screening on the afternoon of a cold public holiday.
Any excuse to draw the curtains on a grey day, and, after all, this was the monarch, so gathering together on the couch was the least a loyal subject could do.
Having had a weekend of queening it up, with Liz's predecessor, Elizabeth I, featuring on both Friday and Sunday nights, "one" could have easily reasoned that "one" would have had a gutsful of British sovereignty.
However, this two-hour-long look at 10 days of significance pertaining to the 50-year reign of Liz II was remarkably watchable.
Black and white footage of a teenage Elizabeth Windsor showed her to be the embodiment of the perfect Christian girl that the Windsors, reeling from the impropriety of Edward's VIII's abdication and marriage to Mrs Simpson, wanted to project.
The narrator suggested that the King and Mrs S had enjoyed a sado-masochistic relationship, that he revelled in her kicks and disdain for pomp and circumstance, and was happy to give it all up, even though, as one commentator said: "Suicide is to a man what abdication is to a king."
However, Edward's indulgence in pursuing personal happiness had a profound effect on Elizabeth, who was, from an early age, obsessed with a grinding sense of duty.
She met Philip Mountbatten, her future husband, when she was only 13 and he, a blonde Adonis (confirmed by the still photographs) only five years her senior.
Lord Louis Mountbatten had his heart set on Philip marrying the next in line and was thrilled when the union took place, but furious, as was his nephew, when Elizabeth broke with precedent and refused to change her married name to Mountbatten.
"What do they think I am? An amoeba," he was heard to utter in disgust.
Quite right too, viewing feminists would have nodded as they watched Philip, forever after, keep a respectful two steps behind.
Footage of the coronation of Elizabeth II looked the worse for wear, but it was brought back into sharp focus by the hilarious commentary of Lady Pamela Hicks, a bridesmaid, and Countess Mountbatten, who remembered the day as being a very long one for the peers, who had the foresight to tuck emergency rations of sandwiches under their coronets.
The pluty-voiced, now ancient aristocrats vividly remembered how Queen Juliana from the Netherlands was less than impressed with the lustre of the royal diamonds, brought out from the cobwebs, and was heard to be audibly derisive of "the dirty jewellery".
When the Queen was anointed with the holy oil, which "set her apart from the people", a huge canopy was erected over that moment in the ceremony as it was considered too sacred to be televised. Deeply religious, the Queen from that moment on dedicated her life to her subjects, but the cost of living a blameless life, and of meeting expectations from within the firm, was immense.
Her sister Princess Margaret, who would say that her sister was "God's representative on Earth", would have remembered those cold words of comfort when God's rep prevented her from marrying Group Captain Peter Townsend because he was a divorcee.
It was then that the idea that the Queen was a cold fish and had, as one journalist said, "Placed her sister's happiness very low in the pecking order", would have first formed in the public's mind.
Phil the Greek put in his respectful second place, and coronation completed, but three short years into her reign, the Queen was cut down to size when, as commander in chief of the armed forces, it is believed she wasn't even consulted over the Suez crisis and the dark British, French and Israeli plot to surreptitiously take possession of the Suez Canal.
United States President Dwight Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, would not put up with that and after the crisis the Queen's constitutional powers were considerably downsized.
Britain joining the EEC further effectively made it just another small European country where, as one commentator said, World War I and II allies such as New Zealand and Australia from then on had to queue in a separate customs lane while Germans and Italians swept through in the European lines.
The Queen and family had become no more than a tourist curiosity.
How the mighty had fallen and how hard it would be to hold on to their specialness in the years to come when her children became all too human in the public eye.
In 1979, when the boat carrying Mountbatten and members of his family was blown up by the IRA in Donegal Harbour, his daughter Countess Mountbatten was plucked from the water where she was lying face down, a breath away from death. Now an antique, the countess remembered being rescued and taken off to Sligo hospital, "where they stuck me back together again".
The interviewer interrupted her matter-of-fact account of events with an admiring, "I say, you are amazing", to which she replied with customary stiff upper lip: "Well, there was no way round it. You had to go through it."
When Windsor Castle caught fire on the Queen's wedding anniversary in 1992, at a time when three of her children were going through messy divorces, she declared it an annus horribilis.
But the public, in pro-Diana fury, fumed that the royals had failed to pay insurance on the castle, and did not show their monarch any sympathy.
Shortly afterward, she took on board the mood of the crowd and volunteered to pay taxes on some of her assets to show mere mortal solidarity with her subjects.
Fortunately the documentary did not indulge too much in raking over the coals of the devastating effect of the Diana years – but it was noted how the royals failed to exhibit appropriate sympathy at her tragic death and weep the obligatory crocodile tears, even though the princess had been an active campaigner against them.
We were spared HRH's fondness for the royal corgis but watched a normally unemotional Queen shed a tear over a transport crisis when the family floating caravan and holiday home, the Royal Yacht Britannia, was decommissioned.
One wondered what mode of transport Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, might be allowed in future. Perhaps the environmentally conscious Charles would be given a - by royal appointment - scooter to get around upon.
The carbon-conscious King wouldn't care less and nor would Camilla his consort, for she is never happier than when astride her horses wearing her alleged filthy underwear.
See Also
