Intimate portrait of the daily life of the British Royal Family drawn from 18 months of filming within Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Balmoral.Intimate portrait of the daily life of the British Royal Family drawn from 18 months of filming within Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Balmoral.Intimate portrait of the daily life of the British Royal Family drawn from 18 months of filming within Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Balmoral.
- Nominated for 1 BAFTA Award
- 1 nomination total
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Did you know
- TriviaCreated at the behest of Queen Elizabeth, eager to humanize the Royal Family at a time of social upheaval, it only aired twice. The Queen concluded that it demystified them too much. For decades, no publicly available recordings existed, except for a few short clips, until the entire film was leaked to YouTube in January 2021. It was eventually taken down but is still available on other websites.
- ConnectionsFeatured in TV's Biggest Blockbusters (2012)
Featured review
Royal Family
This original fly-on-the-wall Royal documentary is quite interesting on a number of fronts. It's access to the private life of the Queen and her family is sometimes quite tedious to watch - as would be, I suspect, a documentary on most of us; but this serves as more of a social anthropology too. Looking back to the end of the supposedly profligate 1960s in the most establishment manner possible, we see a Queen who is relaxed and natural in front of the camera, and though the set piece scenarios are a little dry, we do get a slight sense of just what the job entails. It's not overly deferential which helps, and as we follow the season over which this is set, we get to meet and observe quite a few of those she meets and wonder perhaps if it's the subjects who expect the monarch to behave in a certain fashion rather than she actually choosing to. The usual tours, visits, banquets all feature - an opportunity to take a look at what we wore, drove and even ate fifty years ago and it's topped by a family chat with President Nixon that shows the ultimate mundanity of a job that struggles with endless diplomatic small talk (and family snaps). The photography is effectively discreet and though I'm sure nothing was left to chance, it does offer us a semblance of what might pass for "spontaneity" at court. It's probably more notable in 2024 for being an archive source for so many subsequent programmes, but I imagine that in 1969 when most people knew little about the monarchy they didn't read in the papers, it proved insightful.
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- CinemaSerf
- Mar 30, 2024
Details
- Runtime1 hour 50 minutes
- Color
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