I feel like I’ve missed a memo. Is it Camilla Awareness Month or something? Two weeks ago, we had 90 minutes on her charitable activities in ITV’s Her Majesty the Queen: Behind Closed Doors – which, to be honest, amply satisfied my interest in the lady, fond as I am of a doughty dame. Now we’ve got Queen Camilla: The Wicked Stepmother, a documentary about absolutely nothing we haven’t heard before. It looks like the Christmas ruining of the TV schedules has already begun. Seems to come round earlier every year, does it not?
Anyway. To business. Posh folk alongside less posh biographers and journalists assemble to talk about Camilla’s “remarkable rise” to queendom. We begin with her childhood. She was born in a Nottinghamshire mining town and ate nothing but mice and boot blacking until she was four, when she followed her father down t’pit and got to share his midday break and a cup of pneumoconiosis every Thursday.
I’m kidding, of course. She was born to Major Bruce Shand and Rosalind Cubitt, daughter of the 3rd Baron Ashcombe. They split their time between a country house in East Sussex and a townhouse in South Kensington, London. She had siblings and horses. Or siblings who were horses, I forget. It matters not.
Then she got older, an O-level and a reputation as an efficient dispatcher of injured pheasants during shooting season. “She was great fun,” says everyone. She liked dancing, smoking and having a good time, especially with Andrew Parker Bowles, until she was introduced to the then terrifically eligible bachelor Prince Charles and became his girlfriend for a year and a half. Then Prince Charles’s beloved great-uncle Lord Mountbatten stuck his patrician nose in and put the kibosh on a relationship that seems to have been going swimmingly and probably would have saved a lot of people a lot of bother if it had been allowed to continue. Camilla Shand was “clearly not” a virgin, you see, and so 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer was hauled in instead, and ’Mills married Parker Bowles instead.
Queen Camilla: The Wicked Stepmother review – what is the point of this dull rubbish?
