On Tour with the Queen, Monday 9pm, Channel 4

On Tour With the Queen

Sadly not the warts and all, fly-on-the-wall documentary of life on the road with Lizzie and Phil I was expecting, On Tour with The Queen instead took a look back at her Majesty’s 1953 tour of the Commonwealth, with actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah - aka Casualty’s Finlay Newton - at the helm for the first of four episodes.

The Queen was landed with the lengthy tour of duty just a few weeks after her coronation, the aim being to assert Britain’s position as a world power in the face of a crumbling, unprofitable Empire which it could no longer afford to sustain. With the UK still a rubble-strewn, poverty-stricken mess after the World War II effort, and somebody having to pay to clean it up, it was clear that something had to give.

The first port of call was Bermuda, which Kwame suggested was probably picked because it provided her Majesty with a nice easy “gig” to settle her into things. Part paradise island and part wealthy tax haven, with its town crier clad in velvet and frills and its “Little Britain” nickname, Bermuda is a curious place which clings on to its relationship with the Motherland with some relish.

Jamaica, the scene of a fervent independence movement when the Queen first dropped by in the ‘50s, was expected to be an entirely different proposition, but a radio phone-in Kwame guested on in Kingston was deluged with a barrage of disgruntled locals practically pleading with Britain to take the country back under its control. The embarrassment in the studio was hilariously palpable, but the best Kwame could muster was a belly laugh in response to a subject crying out for some more serious discussion.

The reams of fascinating archive footage of the 27-year-old Queen coming face-to-face with her Commonwealth in glorious Technicolor made On Tour with the Queen worth viewing, but with Kwame at the helm the show never quite seemed to decide whether it was a serious, political documentary or just a whimsical, deferent travelogue.

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