'Forget With Love, Meghan, Prince Andrew should be the Royal next in line for a Netflix show'
Meghan Markle's lifestyle series takes self-awareness to hilarious new levels, says Brian Reade, which makes the Duke of York the best candidate for another programme
Mirror Columnist
I knew we’d find something to see us through these darkest of days.
I knew we’d unearth a mine of comedy gold to distract us from the Grim Orange Reaper and the potential collapse of the known world order.
But who’d have thought it would come in the angelic form of Meghan Markle? Otherwise known as the Duchess of a southern county she couldn’t pick out on a map.
Her latest Netflix lifestyle series, With Love, Meghan, has split critics. Between those whose toes curled up with embarrassment at its turgid naffness and those whose torsos curled up with laughter at how such vacuous fakery could be so lavishly rewarded.
We see her making honey, flower arranging, candle-making, jarring preserves, jam-making, scenting towels, all the things the average working mother does every day.
So fake and lacking in self-awareness is this world of “joy” she “creates” that it’s done with a team of lackeys in someone else’s mansion. It’s like staring into the bowels of TV Hell and seeing something worse than It’s A Royal Knockout. But the fact it has garnered such attention means Netflix will want another Windsor hanger-on series. Not with Meghan, as her royal barrel has been well-and-truly scraped. Nor with Paul Burrell as his fingernails pierced the barrel’s bottom 20 years ago and are now halfway to Australia.
But what about that other royal outcast who has done nothing but humiliate the country and family that keeps him in clover? What about With Love, Andrew?
Sure, there may be a problem in persuading someone to lend the Duke of York their kitchen (although he could fall back on Pizza Express) and find friends and family to pop around (although Fergie could keep walking on and off set in different wigs and costumes).
But like Meghan, he knows how to ponce around in pastel with a Pringle jumper over his shoulders and he too is looking for a “new chapter” in his life. Or just a chapter. Like her, he can advise viewers to “give your carrots a bit of breathing space” although it’s a different root vegetable he’s been forced to give a breather to.
He knows all about jam, having been in a big one for the past few years. And preserves as he desperately tries to preserve what’s left of the fortune Mummy left him. He too could bake a cake in his own image: a sponge.
Imagine his riveting day based on what we know of him. It begins with rollicking the valet for opening his curtains at 10am and demanding he sack the maid for not arranging his teddy bears in the right order on his pillows the previous night.
We could marvel as he stares at his phone waiting for offers of work that never come, sits on the couch with a shotgun in case Charles sends the bailiffs round and tears around Windsor Great Park in his latest Bentley, shouting “get out of my ****ing way” at gatekeepers. We could gasp in envy as he plays carpet golf and chats with the cardboard cut-outs of armed police security men he keeps outside his door.
We could observe him viewing a Falklands documentary for the fiftieth time that week then watching The Chase, getting no answers right, then switching over to the show whose title sums up his life: Pointless.
Over to you, Netflix. But maybe don’t ask Emily Maitlis to front it.