Jake Bailey: Royal obsession is star-craving bonkers

Opinion

COMMENT

By Jove, don't get me started on the royals.

Oh bother, golly gosh, now look what you've done, you've got me started.

But that's okay, because actually I'm a little late on joining in the frenzied, frothing cravings for a glimpse of Will and Kate. Oh wait, it's the other ones, Harry and Meghan.

It's tough to tell them apart, but to be fair, only because they're all impossibly good looking and polite and seem to be very lovely.

And I really do mean that as a diamond of sincerity amongst the rough of a 21-year-old guy who has been smothered and choked by a pink, flowery cloud of perfume that is the royal coverage, the sickly sweet lingering fumes emitted by the chugging engine of public obsession.

They are not to blame, in fact, they are to be commiserated with. In Australia, where I caught some of the coverage of their tour, a chopper fed a live image of a car driving through central Sydney, back to the 75th floor office of some fat television tycoon's empire where he laughed gutturally, pressed a button, and beamed it out to every screen in Australia.

It could have been any car. In fact, it may have been any car, since a chopper with a long lens whizzing through the air a few hundred metres above Sydney gives exactly the video quality you'd expect.

But the shot persisted, even when Meghan wanted a toilet break or Harry couldn't find his favourite tie, and the chopper was left hovering outside Government House for an extra 20 minutes. The car sat docile in the driveway. It was about as riveting as the commentary the TV panel gave once it began driving down the road.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Dean Purcell

What they were aiming to capture on film I am not entirely sure. Were they aiming to prove with video evidence that the royal family possess teleportation technology not yet available to the commoners - or the equally shocking alternative, that they actually ride in cars just like the rest of us? Were they eagerly anticipating a shot of Harry rolling up his sleeves to replace a flat tyre?

They were far more likely to find themselves with a shot of the royal couple looking out grimly upon the vast orange, sandy, unbearably hot cauldron of what makes up 90 per cent of the country, as Harry leans over and softly whispers to Meghan "Ah yes, this is why we used to send the prisoners here".

The 6pm news hit saturation point. It teemed with royal coverage. The public were coated and dripping in it like American tourists in humid heat. And when they ran out of royal coverage and got bored with displaying the plight and suffering occurring across the globe concurrently to the royal holiday, just as the public got a chance to wipe their drenched foreheads, they naturally reverted back to snippets of the royal wedding.

Next time you have guests over for dinner, use them as subjects in an experiment. Wait until conversation really gets interesting. This will likely be at some point after dinner as you retire to the lounge, glass in hand, but before the evening deteriorates into silliness.

Wait for them to start catching you up on what has been happening in their world lately -
work, family, lives. This conversation, in the purpose of our experiment, will serve as the '6pm news' of their life.

Sit in waiting for the perfect moment to strike. The ideal time is as they open up on a recent trauma they have faced - wait until they really crack into the good stuff, the suffering and horror, something sincere that exposes their soul to you in the most vulnerable of ways. This will serve as 'meaningful journalism' in our experiment.

Tears should be beginning to form in their eyes, when you leap up from the couch and ask cheerily: "Would you like to see our wedding video again? No? How about a quick flick through our holiday pictures from Australia last month?"

Or, better yet, grab your subject by the shoulders, shake their sullen face away from the floor and snap their neck back into staring up to your frenzied eyes, and ask: "Can you believe I wore the same trench coat two days last week?"

And when you see their face, mouth gaping in helpless shock, their wounded eyes asking how you could do this, just then you might click onto the absurdity of our collective obsession about the wedding, holiday, clothing of a presumably very nice, very normal couple.

Who are these high tea dwellers who spend their lives, or in other words, their unoccupied hours, poring over what Meghan has worn on her tour- or more accurately, her reckless actions in giving the public a hint that she may own a finite number of clothes.

They fall into the masses who are clinging onto any information they can get, hissing and spitting and tearing the flimsy sheets of paper like a crowd of schoolboys with the answers to the exam.

It must be utterly bewildering to be on the receiving end of for Harry and Meghan.

I couldn't care less about their wedding videos, or their attire, and I wish them a lovely holiday- but I don't want to hear about any of the following more than I would want to hear about my neighbours. Probably to their great relief.

My Nana used to joke that unless I learned to eat with my elbows off the table, I would never be invited to dine with the Queen. Well bugger that Nana, I'd rather go for a beer with Will and Harry, and share a laugh with them about the absurdity of it all because, of anyone, I'm sure it's not lost on them.