Review of last night's Channel 4 show

In contrast to Frankie Boyle’s no-punches-pulled Farewell To The Monarchy, which followed on Channel 4 last night, The Windsors Coronation Special offers a comparatively affectionate mockery of the characters within the Royal Family.

Indeed, its ultimate message is that a big expensive show of pageantry is just what this nation needs to come together, a distraction from the cost-of-living crisis engulfing the rest of us.

It was the culmination of a storyline in which penny-pinching Rishi Sunak – as depicted by his Happy Valley lookalike, Amit Shah – wanted to curtail the extravagances envisaged by King Charles (Harry Enfield), whose ascension has very much gone to his head. So the puritanically frugal Princess Anne (Vicki Pepperdine on fine, grotesque form) is deployed to slash the costs by holding it in the Holiday Inn Express, Slough.

Writer Bert Tyler-Moore – penning his first script since the death of his co-creator George Jeffrie in 2020 – has his work cut out in exaggerating the exploits of the real Royal Family, which already seem to exist in an over-the-top soap opera, especially where Harry and Meghan are concerned.

Here – in what doesn’t seem a million miles from the truth – the renegade couple, played by Richard Goulding and Kathryn Drysdale, are ‘standing and living in their "full knowing"’ in California wanting nothing to do with the rest of The Firm. But if they don’t deliver some premium Royal content soon, Netflix will want their $100 million back, so the couple cynically decided to attend.

In a moderately successful bid to give the cartoonish caricatures enough to do over an hour, various subplots involve Pippa (the deliciously bitchy soap villainess Morgana Robinson) disguising herself as the simpering Sophie Wessex to wangle an invitation to the Coronation; Eugenie and Beatrice (Ellie White and Celeste Dring), sidelined from the big day because their appalling father was being ‘too honourable’ heading to York in a flimsy Railway Children parody; and Camilla  (Haydn Gwynne) breaking into the Tower of London to steal the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which the woke Wills has forbidden her from wearing … before taking up golf with Charles to avoid the whole cut-price Coronation altogether.

All very ridiculous, of course, and everyone revels in the fact – especially the most delicious mangling of vowels since Allo Allo in its pomp. As Prince William, Hugh Skinner is especially funny in doing this – a fact exploited by Tyler-Moore in giving the heir a new youth scheme to promote, if not pronounce: Out And About.

Not every strand works, but for all its preposterousness, it feels as if it’s offering a more accurate background to the family circus surrounding the ‘coronarshaan’ than any serious news programme would ever do. It certainly has ‘just as much truth… as there is in so-called objective facts’. © Prince Harry.

• The Windsors Coronation Special is streaming on Channel 4 now.

Review date: 1 May 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett