India Hicks, goddaughter of King Charles, was the first notable name to get in on the action. The India Hicks Podcast, which debuted in 2019, offered a “wonderfully intimate look” into her life and her “extraordinary family”. It consisted of conversations about “movie stars, matadors and maharajas” with her mother, Lady Pamela Hicks, the late Queen Elizabeth’s former lady-in-waiting.
A couple of years later, Princess Eugenie co-hosted Floodlight: an interview podcast about modern slavery made with her charity, the Anti-Slavery Collective.
Then came Meghan Markle’s Archetypes. In this much-hyped 2022 series, the Duchess of Sussex spoke to some of the biggest names in popular culture (including Mariah Carey, Paris Hilton and Serena Williams) about the “labels that try to hold women back”.
The following year Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson, the Duchess of York, debuted a chat podcast with her friend Sarah Thomson, and Queen Camilla launched The Queen’s Reading Room podcast.
The latter, an extension of her literacy charity of the same name, features interviews with authors and prominent book-lovers such as Dame Joanna Lumley and Richard E. Grant. But Camilla is only featured for a couple of minutes per episode.
Though podcasts are an intimate medium, as Dr Beckett points out, they also enable royals to maintain a great deal of control – certainly more so than in a traditional TV interview.
“They have to be careful because they’ve tried different tactics like this,” Beckett says. “In 1969, Queen Elizabeth actually allowed for a documentary of her home life. It was broadcast on the BBC once, then she realised it was a mistake. It let people in too much into her personal life, and she actually banned it from being ever played again.” (Decades later, it leaked on YouTube.)
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In 1987, younger members of the British royal family also competed in the TV game show It’s a Royal Knockout alongside celebrities, running around in costumes doing obstacle courses for charity.
“People thought it was a disaster,” Beckett says. “Royals are not like other celebrities, they have to act a certain way and maintain certain standards … but at the same time be ‘normal enough’ that we [relate to] them.”
Moral influencers or ‘f—ing grifters’?
So, do people actually care about this exclusive royal content or are they content just watching The Crown?
The most successful of the bunch is undoubtedly Meghan Markle’s Archetypes. The show debuted in the top spot on Spotify in Britain, the US, Canada, Ireland, India, Australia and New Zealand. But it also lost a lot of steam by the end of the season, and Meghan and Harry’s Archewell Audio “mutually agreed” to leave Spotify soon after.
Meghan Markle made one season of Archetypes, in collaboration with Spotify.Credit:
Their initial deal reportedly cost $US25 million ($38.5 million), and The Wall Street Journal reported the couple had failed to meet “productivity benchmarks” to justify the sum. Though their 2020 agreement promised “a multi-year partnership … to produce podcasts and shows” (multiple), nothing else materialised.
Bloomberg reported that Harry had pitched a number of ideas, including a show in which he interviewed “controversial guests such as Vladimir Putin, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump about their early formative years”.
Celebrating their exit from the company, Spotify executive Bill Simmons went so far to call the pair “f—ing grifters” on his own podcast. He had also previously criticised Prince Harry, saying: “Why are we listening to you? Nobody cares what you have to say about anything unless you talk about the royal family, and you just complain about them.”
Dr Beckett believes it is a good thing, however, when royals publicly lend themselves to causes. Whether it’s Princess Eugenie with modern slavery or Queen Mary with youth loneliness – or, historically, Princess Diana with AIDS – “royalty adds cachet”.
“When they get involved, it really gives the charity or the cause a lot of support and a lot of attention,” she says. At the very least, she adds, “It gets the attention of the media.”
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