For a fruitful way of spending your time under isolation, The Windsors (Channel 4, three series now available) has much to delight in—not least linguistically.

The entire cast is brilliant. Charles (Harry Enfield) and Wills (Hugh Skinner, gormlessly idealistic to follow his cameo as feckless Will in W1A) have great fun with their posh accents and mannerisms; but it’s the personas, and voices, of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie (Ellie White and Celeste Dring, wonderful) that I find most fascinating (or rather fascinatoring).

Along with their spectacular vapidity, their facial expressions and body language contributing to the effect, they both mangle and relish their vacuous words, constantly finding new ways of distorting vowel sounds—and even lavishing their regal attention upon the last word of a sentence, managing to elongate final consonants.* So just as you think the sentence is fizzling out with its usual innocuous ending, there’s a whole concentration of extra input. It’s like a VAR replay, slowing up even more to show if the ball really crossed the line.

Celeste Dring was inspired by Made in Chelsea—indeed, her very name surely qualifies her for the role. At least they go easy on the whole AQI uptalk thing???, though it is well suited to the Sloaney style (“I’m like, hellooooo?”).

A taster (“I think a job is where you have to go into a building, or something…”):

In their attention to enunciating vowels and consonants I detect a progression from series 1 to series 3. Good start-up words to practise include “now”, “house”, “years”, “money”, “water”.

The princesses deserve an award for elocution, if perhaps not for advancing the cause of women.

* BTW, the extensive stammering tag on this blog is worth consulting. One feature of speech impediments is that we (that’s an inclusive “we”—disfluencies of all kinds may afflict royalty and their loyal, servile subjects alike) tend to stammer on initial consonants: it’s getting going that’s the problem. One technique in “prolonged speech” therapy, a means of desensitisation, is to elongate the consonants, smoothly (easier for ssssustainable nasals and fricatives, whereas p-p-p-plosives have to be repeated). Now the fragrant princesses have got me wondering if it might be fair to give the neglected final consonants a chance too.