A rude new documentary dissects Queen Elizabeth II

In the very early '60s, David Frost did a routine on the BBC show That Was the Week That Was imagining the sinking of the royal yacht. TW3 satirized current events—it was the seed from which budded Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update," HBO's Not Necessarily the News, and Jon Stewart's The Daily Show—and Frost described the monarch as paddling away for dear life while "smiling radiantly."

The queen was forever being so described by unctuous columnists at the time, so this skit was seen as quite audacious. You simply didn't make fun of the royals—not on a mass medium like television, anyway.

Within a few years, though, the queen would be pitilessly portrayed as a grotesque (wearing a nuclear disarmament badge, picking stuff from garbage bins) on Peter Fluck and Roger Law's viciously funny TV puppet show, Spitting Image. She was the subject of the Sex Pistols' first single ("God save the queen, she ain't no human being," etc.), and Prince Charles would appear as a maudlin figure of blighted soap romance in the scalding fortnightly Private Eye.

Can any institution survive such relentless and escalating mockery? Well, yes. Or so far, anyway. A week ago, the queen became the oldest-ever monarch in British history. She has just delivered her 50th consecutive Christmas message to the nation. The Guardian reported that last year she was "more than three times talked about as Kate Moss." And two days before Christmas, Buckingham Palace launched a Web page, The Royal Channel, on YouTube. The queen only began using a personal computer a couple of years ago, but her grandchildren, the princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, are said to be keen on Facebook.

Meantime, Prince Charles waits in the wings. And the young princes, Harry and Wills, are as pap-pursued and tab-familiar as Posh and Becks. So the future of the monarchy in a celebrity culture is (A) secure? (B) on probation? (C) incredibly unlikely?

Good question.

2007 hasn't been quite another annus horribilis—horrible year—which was the monarch's own phrase for the year that followed Diana's death on August 31, 1997. The tsunami of public grief turned the famous stiff upper lip into jelly. It was clear that a star was being mourned, not a royal, and the queen's awkwardly distant reaction sent her family ratings skidding into that dank zone where George W. Bush's are stuck today.

But the queen plugged doggedly away regardless. She overcame. She is now applauded for her "decency," her hard work, her sense of humor. A story that has been going the rounds of London has her having lunch with a female New Labor minister. Mid-lunch, a cell phone chirruped in the pol's handbag.

"Nobody important, I hope?" Her Royal Highness supposedly inquired.

Probably apocryphal, but it's telling that it could be accepted as even remotely possible that such a remark was made. The fact is that we know a fair amount about the way Prince Charles's mind works, since he has no problem letting us know, whether it's his views on postmodernist architecture, which are close to those of Tom Wolfe, or on the environment, where he was way ahead of the "green" curve. About his mother's views and character, however, we know rather little.

This has—in this most recent twelve months since Diana's death—opened the door to fictioneers.

The Queen, a movie directed by Stephen Frears and written by Peter Morgan, was among the first. It deals precisely with how the royals dealt with the need to connect with their supposed subjects, the public, in a media-drenched era. Neither Frears nor Morgan support the monarchy, but the film is sympathetic, as is Helen Mirren, who won a well-deserved Oscar for her portrayal of the monarch.

Worse was to come. The next fiction was concealed. Annie Leibovitz, the Vanity Fair photographer, first shot the queen last April, taking a series of portraits to mark her first visit to the United States in 16 years. Another Leibovitz royal shoot in October was itself filmed for a BBC documentary by production company RDF Media.

RDF made a promo reel for a press launch in which the queen was apparently stalking out of the shoot in a huff. Huge, huge headlines resulted and, in the stills that accompanied the stories, the monarch did look mad as hell.

But actually RDF had tweaked the cut. The queen was in fact walking into the shoot. Presumably the perps presumed that the palace would be too lofty to complain. Wrong. And, rather as in the old days, but metaphorically, Peter Fincham, the relevant BBC higher-up, lost his head.

Now have come two novels. The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett, describes what happens when the queen, a functional illiterate, is forced by her yapping corgis into contact with a traveling library. She begins to read. And reads increasingly serious stuff. She begins to get "ideas," somewhat to the dismay of politicians and the dereliction of her duties. Indeed, she plans to become a writer.

A month later, the novelist Emma Tennant published Autobiography of the Queen. In it, the queen sneaks out of the royal Scots seat, Balmoral, escaping scandals and scrutiny for a retreat to the Caribbean island Santa Lucia. And somehow the woman whom Annie Leibovitz describes as "probably the most photographed person in the world" does all of this unobserved.

But these fictions are cream puffs compared with the cannonball that just hurtled in from the world of fact.

On Boxing Day, as Brits call the day after Christmas, the popular historian David Starkey ended his 17-part Channel 4 series on the British monarchy with an examination of the Queen's family, the House of Windsor. About the queen herself, Starkey, who has been characterized as "the rudest man in Britain," is fairly brutal.

He has described the queen as poorly educated. "I think in many ways she has found her role often very frightening, often bewildering, and requiring her to do things in which she has absolutely no interest, and to meet people she finds deeply unsympathetic, like me," he told Guardian interviewer Aida Edemariam. Why him, she asked?

"Well, I don't think she's at all comfortable with anybody—I would hesitate to use the word intellectual, but it's useful. I think she's got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture—you remember: 'Every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.' I think the queen reaches for her mask."

Starkey is drawing on personal memories here. He curated a museum show on Elizabeth I in 2003 and lunched with the queen. By his description it wasn't much fun. He said she was annoyed that her gin and Dubonnet was slow in arriving and that her interest in royal history—including his show—extended no further back that her own grandfather. And so forth.

Still, Starkey finds some hope for the future of the monarchy in Prince Charles. This has startled those (many, many) for whom the prince has been a cartoon figure for too long, but perhaps he's right. Charles clearly has an inquisitive nature, and it would be useful for the UK to continue to have some sort of settling counterforce to short-term globalized business interests in an increasingly threatening world. But the ship of state is fragile, no question.