Last Night's TV reviewed: Sad sign of the rhymes

Wisely, they left the bit about it all being done in Shakespeareanstyle blank verse until the bottom of the page.

Various people, including that BBC website, have described Bartlett’s play as “bold”.

I’d say it was anything but. If any audience is likely not to mind a story being told to them in verse then it’s people who go to the theatre.

Adapted for TV, the speaking in verse bits didn’t seem or sound “bold” so much as misguided, weird, different for the sheer sake of being different, showing off and above all else, distancing the audience from what was in effect a regally good story.

Set roughly speaking now, the late and much-lamented Tim Pigott-Smith put in an ermine-clad performance as Charles, the reluctant, self-doubting new monarch, determined to make his mark on history.

A clash with Parliament over a new press freedom bill ensued during which Charles acted like a medieval tyrant of old, marching to Westminster, banging on the door of the House of Commons and telling the MPs to go home.

Riots followed, tanks outside the Palace and a constitutional crisis.

I wouldn’t say it was up there in terms of pace, tension, drama or believability with any other political thriller I’d ever seen but it was outstandingly good as a study of characters.

Instead of doing a parody of the characters we believe our real Royal Family to consist of, Bartlett’s story showed us as they could have been or might even be already.

Party Prince Harry (Richard Goulding) was unhappy, brooding, looking for a way out of life as the drunken uncle and in the arms of young black activist Jess (Tamara Lawrence), he thought he’d found it.

Nice guy William (Oliver Chris) was by turns weak and tyrannical, pushed by his wife, Macbeth-style, into stitching up his dad and forcing his abdication.

As for the “timely” part, well, it was fitting this came a few days after HRH Prince Philip, one of the last of the interesting royals, decided to retire.

On the screen, King Charles delivered a bitter lament on much the same subject, foreseeing his successors as a “pretty plastic picture with no meaning.”

Why did a monarch have power, the story asked us continually throughout, if they weren’t allowed to use it? Terrifying quantities of power seem to be invested in the hands of airport staff these days, who, under the umbrella of general post-9/11 nervousness, can order people to take off t-shirts with “dangerous” pictures on them.

It was gratifying to see Sue, customer experience manager in Heathrow: Britain’s Busiest Airport (ITV) taking the opposite approach to a rather trying flyer.

Having failed to explain to an angry and bewildered transit passenger that he’d landed at the wrong airport for his connecting flight, she stumped up a tenner out of her own pocket for a new ticket.

Before I saw Sue, I was tempted to wonder if there was a single aspect of civil aviation, from the maintenance of the runways to the plumbing of the loos, that any viewer needed one more minute of television to reveal to them.

But Sue revealed a lesser seen and most important side – the human one.