I don’t know what to do about it.”Many readers, in a spirit of seasonal generosity, will interpret this incident as confirmation that the royal family do, in spite of evidence to the contrary, serve a useful function. It makes sense, they would say, for a family without any particular talent to be the focus of our great contemporary religion, celebrity-worship, thereby taking some pressure off other famous people – Posh, Becks, Madonna – who have important jobs to do. After all, if this group of ordinary, rather stupid people were not at the centre of public life, patriotic pensioners and obsessive teachers might be causing disruption in bingo halls across the country.Certainly, if the point of having a royal family is to bring comfort to the emotionally fragile, representing different types in the same way the Mystery Plays used to do, then the Windsors are doing a good job. The Queen is the resident frump, Philip plays the Victor Meldrew part, Charles enacts a mid-life crisis, Andrew is the family embarrassment, William the young hunk and so on.

For anyone with a personality flaw, there will be somebody in this goofy, ill-assorted crew to love or loathe. In this sense, Anne is the most successful member of the family.But it is surely possible that, far from being a harmless social catharsis, the existence of a royal family actually stimulates disorder and restlessness in the vulnerable. By acting out various models of inadequacy, set against a background placed dangerously between the real and the fantastic, the Windsors are forever gingering up the itch of hero-worship.It would be going too far to argue that the royal family actively causes insanity, but perhaps, in 2001, a change of role might be considered. The Windsors would be relieved of constitutional duties but asked to provide an essential public service of the care-in-the-community kind, under the control of the Department of Health.

Thousands of flower-clutching folk would thereby be kept occupied while the rest of the country got on with more important matters.terblacker aol
More from Terence Blacker. More than 20 years ago, ITV had a popular and really quite gripping daytime programme called Crown Court. Over three days each week, a fictitious court case would be pursued. In those faraway days before video recorders, it was always touch and go whether one could stretch a cold for the full three days and find out the end of the story.