The show forms part of Channel 4’s alternative coronation viewing.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine.
Despite The Windsors bearing her family name, the Queen never featured in Channel 4’s uproariously soapy spoof – she simply wasn’t silly enough. The same, it seems, cannot be said of her eldest son and heir.
“A couple of people asked whether we were going to ‘do’ Charles now he’s king,” says Bert Tyler-Moore, co-creator of the series with his late writing partner George Jeffrie. “Of course we are, because he hasn’t changed! We didn’t take the mickey out of the Queen, less because of her role as head of state than her as a person. King Charles is still all the things that we took the mickey out of before.”
Rich meat indeed for a comic actor as gifted as Harry Enfield, who’s clearly enjoying his newfound seniority on the set of the show’s Coronation Special, in Hertfordshire’s Brocket Hall (the ancestral pile of convicted fraudster and former reality TV darling Lord Brocket). Solemnly entreating Radio Times magazine to “bow”, he ascends from the kitchens to a room whose walls are covered in portraits of predecessors including, ominously, Charles I.
In the scene, the faintly befuddled future king and Camilla (Haydn Gwynne) are debating the budget for the coronation with Wills (strait-laced, vowel-mangling Hugh Skinner) and Anne (Vicki Pepperdine, reprising her Mrs Danvers-style Princess Royal). Wills and Anne counsel thrift, restraint and, ideally, a Holiday Inn off the M4 as the venue, with the backing of PM Rishi Sunak (Amit Shah, Happy Valley’s homicidal pharmacist). Charles and Camilla aren’t so sure.
“I enjoy ceremony and ritual when it’s done well,” says Gwynne later. “The royals offer that symbolic connection to our pasts and ancestors that I find quite moving. But I’m glad I’m not the one deciding how much to spend.”
“I’m glad for the pomp and parties, but you’ve got to be mindful of what you’re spending and when,” adds Louise Ford, who plays newly minted Princess of Wales Kate Middleton. “No one wants to see something that seems grotesquely indulgent at this time.”
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Written, shot and edited on a painfully tight schedule, The Windsors always walks a tightrope of real life and parallel universe, with newsy lines being crammed in at the very last minute. “The closer it gets to filming, the more fraught it becomes,” says Tyler-Moore.
“What have they done now? Same for the politics – the only real trouble we got into a few years ago was with Theresa May, who we initially wrote as this all-powerful woman because she had this huge majority. We just about had time to fix it. Fortunately, I didn’t even have time to start on Liz Truss.
“All that is both the beauty of it and what makes it harder work than a regular sitcom: the material is great, but it’s constantly evolving so you have to reflect that.”
The biggest royal ruction in recent times was, it seems, the easiest to resolve. Previously characterised in the show as a Terry-Thomas-style rogue, Prince Andrew is now entirely absent.
“It wasn’t a hard decision,” explains Tyler-Moore. “He’s not funny anymore. But his shadow looms over Beatrice (Ellie White) and Eugenie (Celeste Dring) in a way that gives you something different to play around with, that delusional denial. How do they walk into a room, knowing that everyone thinks their dad did that awful stuff?”
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And then there are Harry (Richard Goulding), Meghan (Kathryn Drysdale) and Spare, with its onslaught of revelations that prompted Tyler-Moore to consider anew how to satirise something apparently beyond parody.
“Oddly our Harry was always quite sweet, dim and lovable. After Spare came out, we saw a side that was more petulant and chippy, maybe not such a nice character. It’s weird to think that we might have been a bit nicer to him than we should have been.”
Certainly, the publication of Harry’s memoir caused a stir on set: “I was wondering whether Prince Harry had been watching too much of The Windsors,” laughs Gwynne, while Skinner found it “fascinating and gripping”. But Prince Harry himself, AKA Richard Goulding, says he hasn’t read it.
“You don’t need to research beneath the surface too much [for this series]. Also, I’m quite busy. There’s Tolstoy to read!”
After being recast in The Windsors’ third season owing to commitments elsewhere, including playing Charles’s private secretary on The Crown (“it was an unavoidable situation from my point of view, alas – I couldn’t do the series”), Goulding returns for this special to play Harry. And oddly, it’s not the first time he’s play-acted the coronation – he also played Harry in Mike Bartlett’s acclaimed 2014 play King Charles III, later adapted for the BBC with the same cast.
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Still, he insists the two versions are different. “Harry in King Charles III was a kind of tortured prince, a Hamlet/Romeo type,” Goulding says. “I felt duty-bound to play something more truthful and sensitive there, although the two have elements of the party boy, and of course in both fictions he ends up with a girlfriend who is in some way contentious.
“But they’re very different overall, and Harry’s life has clearly changed a lot since I first played him. The Windsors is very loosely based on something almost approaching a tiny kernel of truth, but it’s so over the top that it’s difficult to know if I have any relationship with the real Harry at all.”
And what of the real royals’ relationship with the show? “We think Beatrice and Eugenie have seen it,” says producer Camilla Campbell. “Someone said they’d come over with footage of it on their phones, saying ‘Look what they’ve got us doing’. And whether or not Wills has watched it, he definitely knows about it, because he made a very sweet, gracious joke at a Channel 4 event a few years ago saying, ‘I shouldn’t talk to you because you made The Windsors.’”
Generally, speaking, most of the cast are shy of expressing firm views on the real-world implications of royal scandals, Megxit, the accession et al, although Goulding reckons “there’s probably still a weird trauma about the Queen not being there anymore”, while Ford concedes to being Team Wills and Kate in any dispute: “If you portray somebody then you always have a connection to them.”
For her part, Drysdale is understandably stout in her defence of Meghan. “Before I came in the show, Meghan was getting a lot of stick from the press and I didn’t really like that,” she says. “What’s been brilliant about our portrayal is that we don’t make her mean or nasty or feed any of that noise.”
“Underneath it all, our characters all kind of love each other,” says Tyler-Moore. “On Spitting Image [on which he has written], you can be pretty mean because they’re sketches and gone in a minute. This Coronation Special is a whole hour so there’s got to be some warmth about them, or it’d be a turn-off.”
And he cheerfully counters concerns he might be sent to the tower with a defiant “bring it on!” Could his iconoclasm be more widely shared with a new, rather less mysterious monarch on the throne?
“I think this probably is landing in a slightly different environment to previous series,” he says. “Maybe after the coronation, there’ll be a bit more of a reckoning: why do we have this weird system? King Charles was opening a community centre in my street. This bloke asked what was going on and I told him, but it felt strange.
“If it had been the Queen, it would have felt quite exciting, but ‘King Charles’ felt like an odd thing to say. Maybe we’ll all get used to it, but I think it has shone a spotlight on the whole thing – which is good for our show!”
“It’s good to tell jokes about the royals,” he concludes, having already started work on a fourth season. “Better that than a revolution.”
The Windsors Coronation Special airs on Channel 4 on Sunday 30th April at 9pm. All previous episodes are available to stream now on All4.
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