Programmes on the royals are just completely crap journalism

[Bouledeneige]

I just stumbled across the programme after finishing watching a movie. Its about the York Princesses. I'm not a Royalist. But I'm a bit shocked about the huge omission in the story. It presents Princess Beatrice's marriage as a fairytale romance but completely ignores the fact that her romantic bridegroom was married with a child when she met him. Wasn't he??

I don't usually watch these shows but they present themselves as giving the low down but then ignore a key point. Because they are self censoring and sugary.

I know I shouldn't care. I don't really. But wow. Here's to single mothers everywhere who just get dumped for someone else. Don't sell them short with stories of fairytale romance. Not sure that's how his kid will feel as they grow up.

Was it a channel 5 one? They’re normally quite trashy.
I think they normally pick a narrative and build it around that, leaving out anything which doesn’t fit. Cheap/easy to make and they know there is an audience who are very interested in the royals - so I think they fling it altogether.

Yes it was C5. Very cheap TV.

It's cheaper to make a few clips and interviews with magazine journalists than other alternatives for a Saturday evening. A niche needs to be found, Channel 5 cannot directly compete with Ant and Dec, or some talent show, or the glorified soap called Casualty, or a Scandi drama on BBC 2.

But they’re not intended as ‘journalism’, they’re cheap tv aimed at the kind of people who camp out overnight on royal wedding routes to wave little Union Jacks at blue-bloods who’ve spent more money on getting married than the wavers will see in their whole lives.

The channel 5 Royal Palaces series looks like it's been cobbled together from pre-2000 stock footage. The film quality is v.poor- I can only assume it's been made during Covid using whatever they could find in the archives, or maybe they can't get Royal permission to film anything new anyway. I quite like other channel 5 docs, they've done some good ones on ancient Egypt lately.