Tag: Victoria PBS

Victoria Recap: A Palace This Size Can Never Have Too Many Teaspoons

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Victoria, Episode 8 - Jenna Coleman
Victoria, Episode 8 – Victoria (Jenna Coleman) ©2016 ITV

“I’m so bored of this,” Queen Victoria says to Prince Albert in the opening scene. She’s referring, of course, to her pregnancy, and though the show skipped from her first trimester to her third, by the end of the episode you will be bored of it too. The Queen, you see, does not much care for pregnancy – she doesn’t like what it’s done to her figure, she doesn’t like that all anyone cares about is the baby and she doesn’t like how it’s slowed her down.

Prince Albert, who has seemingly suffered through nine months of this, is less than sympathetic and more interested in his periodical (which, you should know, he is not reading for enjoyment). “We are not amused,” Victoria says at his lack of attention, which is a thing the real Queen Victoria never said. It is, if you will, the “Let them eat cake” of Victorian Britain.

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Victoria Recap: Don’t Talk Railway At Me

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First of all, where is Lord Melbourne? He didn’t stop being Prime Minister when Queen Victoria married. Nor, indeed, did the Queen stop meeting with him. I will be most miffed if he doesn’t reappear for next week’s season finale.

Anyway, there’s no polite English word for it, but Victoria is pregnant. In the opening scene of “The Engine of Change” our 20-year-old monarch abruptly runs from a classical music concert because she is to be, in the words of her household, “indisposed out of her mouth.” The doctors soon confirm it: There is to be a royal baby. Prince Albert is over the moon and Victoria is afraid, the shadow of Princess Charlotte dying in labor looming large.

She announces it 1840s monarch style, which is to say not on Facebook, but in an audience chamber, from her throne, with members of her government assembled before her to clap when she has delivered her news. It’s most civilized and, frankly, has given me a lot of ideas for my future pronouncements.

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Victoria Recap: The Dogs Wear Jewelry

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Behind every successful queen there is a man wondering what the hell his job is. Well, not Elizabeth I, mind you, but certainly our favorite 19th century monarch, Queen Victoria. The honeymoon is over and it’s back to Buckingham Palace they go to be interrupted by Baroness Lehzen in bed, separated by blood princes walking into dinner and lampooned by political cartoons depicting poor Albert as a German sausage.

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Victoria Recap: You’ll Never Want for Handkerchiefs

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But you may want for a lot of other things, Albert. Anyway, look, I’ve warmed up slightly to our second favorite German prince since last week. And I say second favorite because I think we can all agree Ernest is first, from his unsubtle ruses to let his brother and Victoria have alone time to taking Albert to a “house of ill repute” in the lead up to the Great Royal Wedding of 1840. #ForGodandCountry

Episode 5, “An Ordinary Woman,” opens with some stilted conversation between Victoria and Albert before Ernest leads away the Queen’s lady-in-waiting and our future figureheads for propriety make out behind a random sheet hanging inside a rotunda. But the bliss is short-lived, because inquiring minds want to know: How much money will Albert be given? What will his title be? Who will make up his household? I don’t want to have to ask for money every time I need to buy a handkerchief, Albert says. But the Palace has loads of handkerchiefs! Victoria is bewildered, quite possibly because when she turned 18 she was handed the British Empire, but who’s to say?

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