WIILIAM AND KATE – THE FIRST YEAR: Tuesday 1st May, ITV1, 8pm
It’s been a whole year since the Royal Wedding and Kate Middleton hasn’t been out of the papers since. It doesn’t matter if she’s reading a book, wearing a dress or simply looking wistfully into the middle distance, it’s all news for some sections of the media and this programme plays right into the hands of those who read every word of such articles.
ITV have billed this as a documentary, but in reality it is little more than a nostalgia piece which recounts their wedding day and what the couple have been up to since they tied the knot. Royal editors, ‘body language experts’ and a host of others climb over each other to tell us what a perfect couple they are, yet the extent of these gushing endorsements is such that only the most hardened royalist won’t find this slightly cloying.
Whether it’s all necessary is another question. There’s no doubting the demand for such a programme (after all, the Middleton-saturated Daily Mail is the second most popular paper in the country) but even people like myself, who couldn’t care less about the Royal family, can see that William and Kate are a cracking pair, who look every inch a couple and have a common touch that has most of William’s ancestors lacked. If this William and Kate: The First Year presented even a slightly new angle or had a tiny bit of new material then it would have been far more interesting, but it doesn’t.
Instead we get some rather dull anecdotes, some painfully obvious talking heads (“Anglesey is a small island of Wales..” explains the fawning Katie Nicholls) and a lot of chat about Kate’s various dresses. Expect it to be given away with a copy of The Mail on Sunday in the near future.
