I wonder if SFX will be covering The Palace? After all, it's clearly set in some alternate Universe. On the obvious level, our royal family is not made up of an early-20s King, his younger "playboy prince" brother, their scheming older sister ("oh I just can't wait to be Queen", to paraphrase The Lion King), and a Queen Mother who can't be any older than Prince Charles. Oh, and there's a younger sister too, but she only turned up for about two minutes of episode one. Maybe they forgot she existed? I did. It's not only the family, mind -- it's the general level of believability in the whole thing. Which is pretty low.
The Palace's jaunty theme tune and cheesy character shots are the key here. This is, to all intents and purposes, a soap -- albeit a soap with the odd posh accent, better performances and better direction. The political machinations on display are much more Eastenders than The West Wing, its characters more... well, ITV than BBC, to be blunt. Jane Asher looks faintly martyred as the Queen Mother, probably quite aware that if this were on the BBC her role would've gone to Susan Hampshire and she'd have actually had some dialogue. The older sister (whose name escapes me) sits in her room, scheming away to be Queen, with only the support of her ex-military secretary... and constantly fails to get anywhere. You half expect each episode to end with her plans failed, unnoticed by anyone else, and her exclaiming, "why if it weren't for you pesky kids... I'll get you next time King Richard!"
In this week's episode two, Richard (or King Richard IV, as the credits insist) takes on the Government over cuts in defence spending (the Iraq war apparently still happened in this alternate reality). The King isn't meant to do this, you see, as the British monarch should remain political impartial. But despite the Prime Minister's attempts to stop him, Richard fights on, because he believes in his cause. Hooray! But then the PM's office leaks photos of him partying, a move orchestrated by Richard's girlfriend Miranda (who, incidentally, works for the PM -- oh the complications!) So what does Richard do? Does he fight on regardless, sure of his moral standpoint -- hoorah good King Richard! Go go New Monarchy! -- or does he give up, write a letter of apology to the PM, and dump his girlfriend by ignoring her? You guess.
Some of the actors appear to be under the impression they're in a serious attempt to examine the royals through drama. While they're clearly wrong, their relatively heavyweight performances lend the primary storylines a bit more depth and interest than the childish twitterings of the staff -- who, this week, were on a mission to collect toenail clippings and hair samples from each of the royals; not to sell to gullible folk on eBay, as you might expect, but to swap for cigarette butts of that guy from Manic Street Preachers who died (clearly, this alternate universe hasn't been thoroughly thought through, it's far too similar to ours -- tsk tsk.)
The Palace is, by and large, ridiculous, and only occasionally consciously so. While I'm far from being a Royalist, I can't escape the feeling that such an institution as the British monarchy should be given a bit more respect than to be turned into a clone of Dynasty (or so I'm told; I've never seem Dynasty, but this is rather how I imagine it).
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