Why we're programmed from birth to be obsessed with the royal family – Telegraph Blogs

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Harry Mount


Why we're programmed from birth to be obsessed with the royal family

Programmed by fairytales to be interested in these two (Photo: PA)


There is a strange schizophrenia about the royal family, suffered by a lot of people, including me, which has been exacerbated by the impending royal wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton.

On the one hand, they are, individually, a bunch of not very interesting people; and, in the case of Prince Andrew, perhaps not particularly nice. The essential dullness of their antics is brilliantly caught by Private Eye in mock headlines, saying things like "Two 28-year-olds get married."

And yet, as an institution, the royal family continue to be endlessly fascinating. If you're born and brought up in Britain, it's almost impossible not to be interested in them; and literally impossible not to know at least a little about them.

From birth, we are programmed to absorb an enormous amount of royal information. We are brought up on fairytale legends of princes and princesses; the teaching of British history is fixed onto the bloodline of kings and queens, or at least it was for anyone over the age of 30.

Also, the Royal Family are ever-present in the media, every day, for decade after decade. Pop stars come and go, but we follow the royal family from birth to death. Anyone born before about 1975 will have followed every major moment in the life of Prince William (b.1982); ditto, everyone born before 1941 will be an expert on Prince Charles (b. 1948); no one alive isn't pretty well-informed about the Queen.

Because of this constant drip-drip feed of royal fact and legend, we all end up in this strange position of knowing them, without on the whole ever actually meeting them.

Even people who hate them or are bored by them, know a lot about them. That applies to very few other things, even enormously popular ones. Not everyone could give you the name of, say, a single Manchester United player; not everyone could tell you who sang in Oasis. But everyone knows who the Queen is.

This ubiquity of, and knowledge about, the Royal Family isn't confined to Britain, either. A friend was recently in a New York taxi cab, being driven by an Afghan man who couldn't speak English; suddenly, in the middle of the journey, the cabbie turned round and shouted to my friend, with a big grin, "Kate Middleton?"

By the time that Kate Middleton becomes Queen, with that sort of international exposure, she will be easily the most famous woman in the world – just as her prospective grandmother-in-law is today.

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