‘In my opinion the Queen and David Bowie have more in common than either might realise,’ claimed Janet Street-Porter in the Observer Magazine on 18 April 1976, in a story marking her late Majesty’s 50th birthday. She saw Elizabeth II as a creature, like Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, looking like us, more or less, but in all other respects living entirely removed from ordinary life.
Street-Porter wondered at the ‘unhuman task’: the absence of privacy, the burden of being an irreproachable figurehead and the fact that ‘it wouldn’t matter a jot if she did not speak in public again.’ This had been thrown into sharp relief by the 1969 TV documentary on the royal family, which had given a glimpse of ‘a rather nice jolly middle-aged lady in trousers.’
