Donald Clarke: Never mind the platty joobs, here’s the Sex Pistols (again)

The flagrant disrespect on display during Queen Elizabeth’s platinum jubilee needs to be condemned. The media (one source in particular) has treated a venerable institution — admired even by those who wouldn’t welcome it to their own country — with a contempt that borders on gerontophobia. God bless the whole lot of them, I say. They have done much good for the United Kingdom. Tourism. Pageantry. Colourful costumes. Keep your snide remarks to yourself. They can’t answer back, you know.

Seriously, have you seen what they have done to the poor old Sex Pistols? Screening on no more likely a place than Disney+, Danny Boyle’s series Pistol, conspicuously timed to coincide with the 45th anniversary of the group’s finest 15 minutes, recasts the story in the style of a less transgressive Bugsy Malone. I trust Dr Wikipedia when he tells me that Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays acerbic impresario Malcolm McLaren, is now 32, but he hasn’t lost the Woolworth-painting ingenuousness he displayed when gazing up at Liam Neeson in Love Actually. Questions should be asked in Westminster about the sugaring up of Chrissie Hynde and Vivienne Westwood. The series’ version of the band itself is scarcely any edgier.

Never mind that. Others will tear the wretched thing apart. They will enjoy doing so as much as I have done here. That is what jubilees are for. Yes, they allow a large portion of the British public to scatter bunting about the hedgerows, drink warm orangeade from creaking trestle tables and pledge lachrymose allegiance to a form of government that hinges on familial descent from louche Nazi sympathisers; minute, improbably fecund lesbian-deniers; dandyish, boozed-up adulterers; overweight, uxoricidal religious schismists; “crookback” nephew starvers; dim-witted antagonists to Robin Hood; Danish resisters of the incoming tide; and Olivia Colman in The Favourite. (Don’t write in to correct apocryphal myths, indirect genetic connections or offensive sobriquets drawn from Shakespeare.)

But they also permit those who dislike that system to performatively display their objections with a smugness that is almost as irritating as the adherents’ blind enthusiasm. That is what McLaren and the Pistols were up to when they released God Save the Queen in the week of Queen Elizabeth’s silver jubilee. The lyrics pretended to a frightful peeve. “They made you a moron … our figurehead is not what she seems … we’re the poison in the human machine” and so forth. Like Violet Elizabeth Bott in Just William, they were going to scream and scream until they were sick. But the archival footage confirms the Pistols were having a whale of a time. Manager and band sailed down the Thames blaring out the music (more durable than their opponents can ever have imagined) to anyone open to recreational outrage.

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Every royal commemoration since has allowed a significant minority of the British population — and a larger proportion of Irish citizenry — to trumpet their lack of interest with unconvincing enthusiasm. When Prince William and Catherine Middleton were married in 2011, the Guardian’s website featured a button permitting the reader to excise all mention of the event from the paper’s news coverage. Click and you were free to read about Estonia’s adoption of the euro, the death of Elizabeth Taylor and (ironic this) The King’s Speech winning best picture at the Oscars without the taint of virtual bunting or pieces on celebratory crockery. The button may also have done away with weary freelance tirades from history professors on the sad persistence of imperial forelock-tugging, but that was a small price to pay for the warm rush of righteousness that surged when the alteration was made. What republican would be without it? How much less amusing would the year have been without the wedding to complain about?

Britain’s hysteria over the platinum jubilee is, of course, a tad embarrassing. Every child in every state-funded primary school is getting a commemorative book. It is not known who coined the now-unavoidable phrase “platty joobs” but, if that mystery is solved, a cell in the Tower of London awaits. Heinz Salad Cream has been renamed “Salad Queen”. HP Sauce has become “HM Sauce”. Various images of the queen have been projected on different bits of Stonehenge. An ancient nation has taken on the quality of a kindergarten overexcited at the imminent arrival of the ice-cream truck.

The opposition is, however, equally animated. Irish Twitter is awash with gags about our neighbours’ descent into a frenzy of red, white and blue genuflection. The genuinely uninterested say nothing. Those unable to suppress their guilty attention devote hours of finger tapping to comic deconstructions on the monarchical urge. Look, I’m doing it here. I’m making jokes about bunting and renamed condiments. Boyle, a republican, and said to have turned down a knighthood, did something similar when he arranged for Pistol to land on platty joobs weekend. McLaren was at it in 1977. Pull on a plastic bowler decorated with a Union Jack. Yell republican slogans at the telly. Jubilees are for everyone.