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Royals in the firing line of comedian's spoof TV series
Sri Carmichael, Evening Standard29 Aug 2008
The Queen is to be portrayed as a Cockney bruiser who gives slacking aides a pep-talk littered with expletives.
Dressed in a prim turquoise suit, tiara and pearls, she stabs her finger and growls: "It ain't f***ing good enough. I give 110 per cent all the time and that's why I'm the f***ing Queen."
The monarch is the latest famous face to be given a spoof alter-ego by comedian Katy Brand, whose new series Katy Brand's Big Ass Show begins on ITV2 on Tuesday.
The "Queen" also has a dig at her late sister. "My sister Margaret was weak so she was never numero uno," she barks. "She couldn't take the heat so she got out of the palace."
In the Buckingham Palace sketch, Elizabeth is annoyed preparations are behind schedule for a state banquet for the French president, and decides to motivate the " muppets" organising it with a bit of her "Windsor magic".
Her staff appear terrified but admiring as she walks off swinging her cream handbag.
In another royal skit, Brand plays Princess Beatrice as a snorting, boisterous toff who forces palace aides to join her and her sister Eugenie in a game resembling BBC2's Dragon's Den.
The princesses pretend to be entrepreneurs facing a row of cowed footmen acting as "dragons". Beatrice plonks a toaster in front of them and demands they stump up £20 for the "invention".
In a sideswipe at perceived infighting among the royals, Eugenie produces a bugging device which she says she found after "Uncle Charles put it in granddad's office". "Jackpot!" Beatrice says. "That's two hundred smackeroonies."
Brand, 29, left Keble College Oxford and performed at the Edinburgh film festival before going on to work in TV production. In 2006 she wrote and performed in her own Comedy Lab Slap for Channel 4.
In her new series Brand will also do spoofs of Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash, Mika, Kate Moss, Kate Winslet and Lily Allen, and create her own characters. Her "jack of all trades" Allen swaps singing for acting and hair-bleaching.
Buckingham Palace would not comment on the royal sketches.
Reader views (1)
It is all to easy to poke fun at someone who has the good manners to behave with decency.
Whatever one's view of the role of monarchy let us respect the person who has never put a foot wrong in her duty to us all for over 50 years.
- Jon, london, 31/08/2008 21:29
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