A Bloke Called Philip.

I went through to the living room earlier to watch the only programme I regularly watch on the TV. I got a talking head with subtitles informing me that Prince Philip had died. Well, I already knew that because both the national news and world news pages on the BBC website had screamed it at me in big letters as soon as I’d booted up the computer this morning. I checked the listings to see whether my programme was still due to be shown at the appointed time. They read:

BBC2. 4pm – midnight. A Tribute to Prince Philip.

I checked BBC1 to see whether it had been transferred over there:

BBC1. 4pm – midnight. A Tribute to Prince Philip.

I wondered what on earth was going on here. How can you justify giving over the whole late afternoon, evening, and night time schedules on the two flagship channels to the death of one 99-year-old man, even if he was a member of the royal family? What on earth can you find to say in eight freggin’ hours?

So I decided to work out what I would say if I had the misfortune to be interviewed on the matter. I came up with the following eulogy:

He offended a lot of people with injudicious and insensitive comments.

Some of them were quite funny, so he gave us a few laughs down the years.

He lived longer than most people do.

Cheerio Prince Philip.

But you see, the real problem here is that I don’t understand why some people take the royal family so seriously. It seems to me that if life for the rest of us is a dour, occasionally dangerous, often disreputable and dysfunctional drama, the royal family is basically the sanitised cartoon version. As such, it’s occasionally entertaining but little else.