Inside Windsor Castle

When I saw the announcement that a documentary series was to be made about Windsor Castle, I hoped that it would be a serious historical examination of a famous castle that has been at the centre of English royal history for nearly a thousand years and remains the home of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. How wrong I was. Instead of a serious, professionally-made history documentary, the producers have served up nothing more than a salacious, shallow, tabloid-style review of the Windsor family and Elizabeth II's reign. This series was not so much taken from the annals of history as cut- and-pasted from a century of muck-raking gossip column headlines. The script sounds like it was written by a committee of celebrity scandal magazine editors, and the various invented scenes that supposedly show the private lives of the Windsors are played out as wordless, amateur theatrical melodramas by incredibly badly-cast and badly-directed "lookalikes". There is nothing here for the serious student of history but plenty for the avid consumer of royal scandal and tittle-tattle. Don't waste your time with this.