Let’s start by agreeing the obvious: reading books for pleasure is a good thing and hurrah for anyone trying to encourage it. Then let us ponder the well-meaning oddity that is the podcast from her charity The Queen’s Reading Room which is a commendable effort by Her Majesty to achieve the above. It starts with the sort of music they use in Channel 5 programmes about Balmoral through the ages or the early love life of the Princess Royal. There’s a breathless introduction, not by the Queen but by Vicki Perrin, the chief executive of the charity. She tells us that HM wants to inspire people to love reading as much as she does, and that each week we will hear from HM herself. Then it cuts to Camilla, sounding as though she’s just lobbed a Marlboro through the window and uttering the fantastically gnomic statement: “I didn’t get out from under a chair for a very long time after I saw it for the first time.” Saw what? Was it attached to the King? And why is her first remark about something she has seen, not something she’s read?
I turned to the website for The Queen’s Reading Room for help. There I found a marvellous photograph of HM seated, for no very obvious reason, by a large china rabbit. There is also a short video. This features the Queen, who lest we forget loves books, introducing a podcast about books, filmed in a room with no books. I exaggerate only slightly. There is a single, solitary book, tucked neatly away, almost out of sight, lost amid the soft furnishings and oil paintings. Couldn’t they find a library to film in?
The first podcast episode is Ian Rankin talking for 25 minutes about his favourite books, which he stores on bookshelves. We cut to a bit of the plinkety-plonk string music from time to time, then back to Rankin reminiscing about how his girlfriend in his twenties, now his wife, introduced him to the Moomins, and if he needs cheering up he’ll reread Jilly Cooper’s Rivals.
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Royal podcasts are triggering for me, but compared with Meghan Markle’s egomaniacal assault on the senses, this one at least has a higher purpose. Meghan’s was about money, self-regard and revenge, whereas Camilla’s is about other people. Let us ponder that for a moment and consider if it might shed some wider light on being royal. Camilla’s podcast is more whimsical and homespun, perhaps deliberately, with no Hollywood bells and whistles. Maybe they thought “we don’t want to look too try-hard, leave the slick socials to the younger generation and Americans”. But if the younger generation are precisely who you want to inspire to read, this may be somewhat limiting. It’s surely deliberate that it’s all about the authors and the books, not the Queen, which, again, seems a bit conflicted: look at me/don’t look at me. Instead, Joanna Lumley, David Baddiel, Elif Shafak, Bonnie Garmus and Frank Cottrell-Boyce will appear on future episodes, telling us why they love reading and which of their favourites are in their “reading room”.
The second episode, with Lumley, is much more engaging and fun, full of advice and enthusiasm and recommendations. Lumley loves A Dance to the Music of Time and, like Rankin, keeps her books on bookshelves. I’m cautiously optimistic that all the other guests will do too, unless the producers stage an intervention. At the end HM is once again asked a random question that tells us nothing. “Of the three Brontë sisters, which are we mostly likely to find on Your Majesty’s bookshelves and why?” HM replies Emily, because she likes Wuthering Heights, and they leave it at that while I weep quietly into my keyboard. And? Why? Tell me why you like Wuthering Heights! What about Jane Eyre? And, by the way, where do you stand on Georgette Heyer?
The project began as a book club on Instagram in 2021 and is now a charity, but to be honest you might find the website more inspiring than the podcast. There are engaging little videos of Camilla looking at interesting books in world-class libraries, and Judi Dench chatting about which book got her hooked (Just William, “and anything about children behaving badly”).
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The Queen makes her one-line podcast debut right at the end, in a clip so exhaustively trailed that it’s hardly worth waiting for. She loves reading Harry Potter to her grandchildren, she says, and the King is a wonderful mimic. She can’t do different voices, but he can. I feel like shaking whoever scripted this. We’ve heard of Harry Potter, for goodness sake, we don’t need the Queen to tell us children will like it. Why not ask her something that might yield an interesting response, or even just: what are you reading right now? Who do you trust for recommendations? What are your top three favourite books for the desert island? Which book did you give up on, which book are you ashamed you haven’t read, have you ever read a Shakespeare play for pleasure? Has anyone? Instead we have Rankin telling us he loves The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Camilla asking the author Peter James how he thinks up plots. The last line is from The Day of the Triffids, because it’s the favourite of a librarian from Chichester called Emma. See what I mean? Odd.
If it’s The Queen’s Reading Room, let’s have more of the Queen. Give her a G&T and a decent interviewer and you’d get far more interesting content, even if we stuck to books, although admittedly that would be a pity. Go on, Camilla. I dare you.
