TV Eye: A right royal runaround

The Living Channel's Prince Philip at 90 was less than revealing. Photo / AP

Living Channel screened Prince Philip at 90 over Queen's Birthday weekend. What good timing. What a nice present for him after all those years of trailing behind Her Maj. Or Cabbage, as he, possibly, calls her. How can you not enjoy Prince Philip? There's always the chance he'll say something rude about people who don't look like English people, say, or journalists. He's an equal opportunity offender, which is another name for a misanthrope. It would have been fun then, to have seen him being interviewed by a journalist, who didn't look like an English person, say.

Alas it was Alan Titchmarsh doing, or rather not doing, the interviewing. He did ask some questions, polite, nervously delivered ones which, mostly, weren't answered. This was one of those interviews which filled in the gaps (or the questions Titchmarsh didn't ask) with plenty of clips of the Duke's life, and with interviews with some cousins, assorted other observers of his life, and his daughter, Princess Anne.

Now that was a bit interesting. She described a rather good father, who read the kids bedtime stories. Who'd have thought? Did he read them Grimm's fairy tales, I wonder? I can go on wondering because, who knows?

What you really have to wonder is why he did an interview. Sport, perhaps. Or revenge. He's got a funny idea of PR. He fobbed off every question, scoffingly. He addressed his interviewer as though he was a mental defective. PP probably thinks all journalists are mental defectives.

His mother seems to have been a bit of a nut. She had a "religious crisis", whatever that means, and a breakdown when PP was a boy. His grandmother took him off for a nice picnic and when they returned PP's mum had been carted off to a "sanatorium" (we all know what that means). He didn't see her again for five years. His father had "buggered orf to the South of Fraance" with his mistress. Titchmarsh asked, reasonably you might have thought, how all this had affected him.

But it's not a reasonable question to ask a 90-year-old toff. It's one of those navel-gazing questions and PP, we were told, has a motto and it is: "Just get on with it".

He didn't notice anything odd about his life; it seemed completely normal. "I mean, how could I compare it with anything else?"

So Titchmarsh, the lamb led to the royal slaughter, might as well have asked the question about what he really thought about Princess Di, or the jokes gone wrong, or how he gets on with Prince Charles. Or whether he really calls the Queen "Cabbage". He could hardly have got a ruder response than he did to his attempting-to-jolly-the bully-along questions. He noted that PP had been given some Oldie of the Year award. "Well, so what?" said PP. "You just get old."

Titchmarsh did try; PP was trying. A sycophantic question about all of the Duke's good works elicited a grumpy response. He didn't do any of these things for enjoyment; he got no pleasure or reward from them. His daughter was more revealing. Her father, she said, was a man who was interested in change and he was in the wrong family for that sort of thing.

So poor old Titchmarsh. He might as well as given up and got up and walked out. At least he'd have retained some dignity. But old PP would have just thought he was even more of a wimpy specimen than he'd already decided he was.

So that was less than revealing. As was Prime's The Making of Downton Abbey. Yes, yes, we know it's not real. But why screen this while the series is still running? Who wants to see Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton having one of those luvvie conversations about how Maggie is Penelope's heroine, "although I loathe you in real life". That's the wrong way around, of course. And we are still, happily and successfully, suspending our disbelief, which is what acting's all about. So I choose to believe, thank you very much, that the Dowager and Mrs Isobel Crawley loathe each other, in what I'm able to happily pretend is real life.

And Mrs Patmore's great iron cooker isn't steel at all. It's made from wood. It's not real. Well, thanks a lot. There goes that illusion - along with the one that Prince Philip's a top bloke, merely misunderstood.

- TimeOut