Royal Family (1969)

Interesting facts

Royal Family is a British television documentary about the family of Queen Elizabeth II. It originally aired on BBC1 and ITV in June 1969. The film attracted over 38 million viewers in the United Kingdom and was sold around the world and seen by an estimated 350 million people. The Queen later had the documentary banned; it has not been shown on British TV since 1977 and access to view the film was heavily restricted. In early 2021 it was leaked and published on the internet. The film remains available to view on the video-sharing platform YouTube and the digital library website Internet Archive.

Filming

Royal Family was commissioned by Elizabeth II to celebrate the investiture of her eldest son, Charles, as Prince of Wales. It was directed by Richard Cawston, scripted by Antony Jay and narrated by Michael Flanders. The film was jointly produced by the BBC and ITV.

It was the idea of William Heseltine, then the royal Press Secretary, and television producer John Brabourne (son-in-law of Lord Mountbatten), who both believed that showing the family's day-to-day life on TV would help to revive public interest in an institution widely seen in the Swinging Sixties as out of touch and irrelevant.

Cawston was approached in March 1968 and filming began on 8 June at Trooping the Colour. A total of 43 hours of material were shot for the documentary. Editing started in March 1969 while filming came to an end in May. All scenes had to be agreed to by an advisory committee chaired by the Queen's husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

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