I watched Channel 4’s savage Andrew Mountbatten musical | UK News

I sat down anticipating Channel 4’s Prince Andrew: The Musical to be outrageous, irreverent and a bit unhinged — but even with the bar already low, one second genuinely floored me. I can deal with satire. I can deal with royals being mocked, skewered and torn aside — particularly Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who has given the nation more than enough uncooked materials. But I wasn’t ready for the second the musical burst into a full-blown, upbeat music about Jeffrey Epstein.

That was the purpose where I stopped laughing. Because while Andrew himself is truthful sport, turning Epstein into a comedy hook felt like a tone-deaf leap into territory that ought to never be performed for laughs. Even The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan identified the same factor at the time: the Epstein scandal is “played for laughs in a way that is not OK.” She was proper — and watching it now, with Andrew stripped of his HRH and utilizing the surname Mountbatten-Windsor, it lands even more uncomfortably.

The show retraces Andrew’s fall with brutal precision, flicking from his disastrous Newsnight interview to his friendship with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

But the second the solid began cheerfully singing “A Different Kind of Duty” — a quantity constructed around Andrew being launched to Epstein — it turned not possible to ignore how grotesque the real-life context is.

Musical satire has limits, and that felt like one we shouldn’t be leaping over. What made it even more surreal is that the musical is definitely excellent at exposing Andrew’s delusion.

One early quantity sees him and Emily Maitlis both believing they “nailed” the Newsnight interview, which is humorous only because we all know what adopted: titles gone, patronages gone, popularity gone.

Seeing that recreated now — realizing the person is Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor because he no longer has the appropriate to use HRH — feels sharper, more brutal, and more revealing than it did in 2022.

But the wildest second of all got here proper close to the end, when Andrew launches into “You’re Always Gonna Need an Andrew,” insisting the Royal Family must keep him around as a everlasting scapegoat.

It’s performed for comedy, but the sting is real: the joke works because you possibly can completely think about him considering it.

What struck me most is how the musical exposes the sheer delusion operating through Andrew’s story. The jokes aren’t exaggerated — they’re pulled from issues he genuinely said or believed.

And seeing that performed out through music only widens the hole between the person he thinks he’s and the fact the remainder of us can see.

Satire ought to problem, provoke and entertain — but it ought to also perceive where the road is. And for me, the gleeful musicalisation of the Epstein chapter crossed it.

Mocking Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is one factor. But the Epstein scandal isn’t a joke — it’s too horrific, too painful, and far too real for musical theatre treatment. That was the second Channel 4’s sharpest royal roast crossed a line.