“No one can stop history,” said Her Majesty the Queen in 1958. Well, for 75 minutes, Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen (BBC One) almost did. Using 400 reels from the Queen’s home video archive, much of which had never been seen by the public before, editor Mark Hammill and director Simon Finch have created a rather impressive and truly moving collage of the first three decades of the life of Elizabeth II. . This is not the chronicle of a queen, but the story of a family.
If the footage is remarkable, it is accompanied by a voiceover made by the queen herself. This is also a mosaic, taken from 60 of the Queen’s speeches (the stopped story was told during a state visit by the President of West Germany, Theodor Heuss), but pointed out by some new thoughts of the Queen, recorded this month in Windsor Castle. Little has been done by the Queen in recent years to bring her so close to the people of the United Kingdom. It’s like he’s taking you, me, you, through his holiday photos and his treasured old videos. What, of course, was her.
These are the first years that are surprising. Before he became an adult, before his father became ill, before the weight of the crown on his head. Claire Foy’s portrayal of the queen in the Netflix drama series The Crown meant that serious and sober devotion to duty came pre-cooked, which was part of her DNA. May be. But in these reels we see a carefree and naughty girl, delighting in the attentions of the camera and her beloved father.
In the early 1930s, we see Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret swaying in the garden, playing with their father (George VI, then Duke of York), who are moving dizzyingly across the lawn on a wicker lounger (deliciously, almost two decades later, to see King George treating two-year-old Prince Charles with the same emotion). In the late 1930s, we are in Balmoral, drawing on the heather and paddling on the lake, while Queen Elizabeth, the mother queen, makes the usual humorous cameos (who knew the royal family was so silly?). In a fascinating short scene, Elizabeth and Margaret, laughing and dressed in matching blue dresses with white polka dots, perform a choreographed dance in front of the camera as the corgis move to their feet. You should be a hardened Republican not to feel a huge heat in them right now.