- by Owen Morton
Regular visitors to this website will have noted that there haven’t been any articles for something like a month and a half. I’m very sorry about that. It’s just that I haven’t really been inspired to write anything, as well as the fact that I’m working pretty much full time at Nottingham Central Library right now, so I don’t have much energy to do anything creative. When I get back to York, there will probably be a flood of articles coming in. In the meantime, try this one out for size.
I don’t know how many of the readership of this website will remember King Rollo. I barely do myself – and I have an impressive memory for such irrelevancies – so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if King Rollo is something that I alone remember. But I’m going to write an article about him anyway. For those of you who don’t remember this fascinating programme of the mid-1980s, this discussion will be of purely academic interest. Well, when I say ‘academic interest’, I don’t actually mean that it is remotely connected to anything academic, nor do I intend to imply that it is interesting. But I suspect you know what I mean.
I remember so little about King Rollo that my knowledge on the subject extends to how to spell it, and also I recall one little fragment of the programme, which I will now reproduce in full (though, of course, paraphrased):
Rollo’s throne room. ROLLO is pacing back and forth, looking miserable. The MAGICIAN is standing behind him.
MAGICIAN: Why are you so upset, King Rollo?
ROLLO: King Charles is coming to tea.
MAGICIAN: What’s the problem with that?
ROLLO: I don’t like King Charles.
MAGICIAN: Then why did you ask him to tea?
ROLLO: Nobody else would come.
The problem, of course, with this is that – besides the fact that if I were a king and my magician spoke to me in such an insolent fashion, I would immediately have him executed – it does rather paint King Rollo in an extremely stupid light. We are to assume from his line ‘nobody else would come’ that he invited all his kingly friends to tea, and none of them would come, for various reasons that we won’t go into here, and the plot of the episode in question probably didn’t go into either. Following this disappointment, Rollo decided instead to invite somebody whom he dislikes to tea. Does this seem sensible? Most normal people would have asked his friends to come round on a different day instead, but no. Not King Rollo. But then, of course, he’s obviously not a normal person (besides the fact that he’s a king, the name Rollo seems to imply ‘weirdo’).
Fortunately, as I recall, everything was okay in the end, because when King Charles turned up, he turned out not to be the seven foot tall axe wielding nutcase that we were all hoping for, but instead somebody that King Rollo actually found he got on with very well. (On a side point, this does suggest that Rollo had never met Charles before in his life, which rather begs the question of how he knew he didn’t like his fellow monarch in the first place.) So, on this occasion, everything was all right.
But I suspect it’s quite possible that there were numerous occasions when Rollo made such a ridiculous decision and things went horribly wrong. Let’s just suggest that, twenty years later in his reign (since at this point in time, Rollo would appear to be maybe six years old), Rollo goes to war with a neighbouring realm, which we’ll call Gwindleland, for no reason other than that I think it sounds like a really good name for a nation. Things do not go according to plan and Rollo finds himself leading the remainder of his army, which amounts to sixteen men, back towards the border in rapid retreat. Let us further suggest that they pass within sixty metres of a really big (1 million men strong) Gwindlish army, which fortunately doesn’t notice them, but they see it.
With his evident capability for making decisions which he himself recognises as stupid (as evidenced by his inviting round of King Charles and then pacing back and forth miserably), it is eminently possible that Rollo would order his sixteen men to attack this extremely large army. They would be crushed quicker than a left-wing uprising in Nazi Germany and, for the sake of argument, we’ll say only Rollo himself escapes back into his own kingdom.
With a total and utter defeat like this under his belt, how long would it be until people back home started to mutter and conclude that Rollo was perhaps not the most effective monarch ever to rule their illustrious kingdom? And how long would it take for this discontent to manifest itself in the form of some kind of revolution? I’ll tell you – not that long at all. The people would throw off their chains, murder King Rollo in a cellar in Ekatarinburg, and rename their country something not too far from ‘the USSR’.
And that’s what weak monarchs get you. Communist republics. And actually, I have to confess, that if they are true communist republics, that’s not so much of a bad thing. Obviously, if Rollo’s former kingdom were to go down the route that our USSR did in the 1930s, that wouldn’t be good. But if people weren’t bastards and were willing to let a system like that work, then everything would be jolly good.
It strikes me, actually, that whatever I start writing an article about, it seems to end up as a rant against the capitalist state. And while this may be all well and good, it probably gets a bit repetitive. So I’ll just stop at this juncture, and conclude that Rollo was a deeply stupid fellow. Either that or he was a visionary who wanted to get thrown out of power so that a communist regime could be established. I suspect we’ll never know the truth.