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The Press and the Culture of Celebrity: Mirren said, “It’s not Americanized – you read that tabloid journalism started in Britain; it didn’t start in America. Americans are conservative and polite by comparison, and intelligent. It actually sort of started in Australia – Rupert Murdoch brought it to Britain, and then spread it into America. It didn’t start [in America] so… You know what? It’s the name of the game. What can you do? You just have to deal with it.
I think what one forgets about the Monarchy is that, for example, in the Regency period, there was a huge amount of political satire. I mean, if you saw some of the cartoons that were put into the newspapers or put up on walls of the Regency era, you’d be absolutely horrified. They were so venal in attacking and critical, and far beyond anything that we do. There was a cartoon that I remember that had the queen – I can’t remember, it was a princess, or the queen – and it was like the equivalent of Princess Diana, except it wasn’t Princess Diana, but that sort of personage. And this cartoon shows her sitting on a rock, by the seaside. It’s only when you look really closely, you realize the rock is made up of a huge pile of penises, saying, ‘That is what her sexual life is all about.’ Shocking, seriously shocking.
And so the Monarchy has come in and out – not necessarily in their favor, but in and out of an atmosphere of overt criticism or freedom of people feeling free to criticize. And, one forgets they’ve been through a lot over hundreds of years. You know, Charles I got his head chopped off by the people, so they know all of that. They know where they’re coming from, they know their history better than we do. And one tends to just see it – I see it, I think that they see themselves in the context of history very strongly. These tempests come and go, and they wash over them, and they’re still standing. They find ways of dealing with it, ‘Oh, that was a bit dodgy.’
Above all, what a monarch needs is the love of the people. If all of Britain loathes the Monarchy, they’d be gone like that. But the reality is we don’t. We criticize them, we torture them, we secretly buck their phones, and then put the results in the newspapers. We satirize them; we make movies about them. But we’re allowed to do that, and in a way, all of those things, ultimately just build a love – a weird kind of love for them. It’s like a family. It’s very much a family relationship, really.”
