Theresa May and Donald Trump join the cast of Channel 4's spoof royals soap 'The Windsors'

As 'The Windsors' returns for its second series on Channel 4, Gerard Gilbert visits the set and meets the cast including Gillian Bevan, who plays the Prime Minister

The US actor Cory Johnson (right) will play Donald Trump in the new series of 'The Windsors' with Harry Enfield (Prince Charles) and Haydn Gwynne (Camilla)

Nervously watching the results stream during the recent general election were a pair of comedy writers, Bert Tyler-Moore and George Jeffrie – creators of The Windsors, Channel 4’s spoof soap parodying the Royal Family. This has nothing to do with any political preferences, but the fact that they have introduced a new character for the new series, Theresa May, and the prime minister's calling of a snap election endangered a whole raft of storylines.

“The snap election was a shock. It happened with three days of filming to go”, says Tyler-Moore when I spoke to him before the results were known. “In our series she is the prime minister, and we think that will still probably be the case.”

By a thread. In any case, May, in the shape of actress Gillian Bevan, is on set when I visit the slightly surreal filming location in a former training centre for HSBC bank workers in the Hertfordshire countryside near St Albans. Shorter than the real May, but otherwise a slightly disconcerting simulacrum of the PM in a red dress and (inevitably) kitten heels – Bevan’s May is attending a dinner thrown by Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, for the visiting Chinese premier.

“Brexit has forced her to come into the series because she has to do trade deals”, says Bevan in a husky undertone that may simply be the actress still in the character. She has, she says, been through several varieties of wig as the make-up department try to keep up with May's changing hairstyles. “She's becoming more like what we originally chose”, says Bevan. “In the last two weeks she's suddenly had a haircut like me.”


 Bevan as Theresa May in 'The Windsors'. Enfield plays Prince Charles 

This is the sort of royal function that could only exist in the gleefully cartoonish world of The Windsors – with Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice working as waitresses, and Fergie attempting to flog the Chinese her ‘Duchess of York Right Royal Juicer’. Ellie White and Celeste Dring as Beatrice and Eugenie – forever delighted when they get the chance of 'real work' - have been one of the show's standout delights. How closely have they copied the princesses?

“We just do stupid voices... it’s not an impression because I don’t know what they’re like”, says White, whose scouring of YouTube only unearthed a two-minute sequence from Andrew Marr's BBC series The Diamond Queen (2012) in which Beatrice showed Marr around the miniature cottage in the grounds of Windsor Castle. “Her doing a tour of her Wendy House that she had been given money by her grandmother to do up,” says White. “It was genuinely like something from The Windsors.”

“Instead of referencing Beatrice and Eugenie, my process is to do a poor rip-off of a Made in Chelsea person”, says Dring. “People like Louise [Thompson] or that small irritant called Toff [Georgia Toffolo]. It’s a lazy posh voice and me and Ellie compete to out-drawl each other.”

“Loads of people always ask, ‘Do you know if Beatrice and Eugenie watch it?’, but I’ve got no idea”, adds White. “We heard a rumour that one of them does. Apparently, all the staff at the Palace watch it and find it really funny.”

Beatrice and Eugenie’s mother, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, almost certainly won’t be tuning in, says Tyler-Moore (no relation of Mary Tyler Moore). “Fergie said she wasn’t going to watch it because she got very upset when they’d take the mickey out of her on Spitting Image – but I think we have a very sympathetic Fergie.”

Kathryn Drysdale as Meghan Markle and Richard Goulding as Prince Harry with Morgana Robinson as Pippa Middleton in 'The Windsors'

“She's such a fascinating woman and quite vulnerable”, agrees Katy Wix, who plays Fergie. “I ended up getting stuck watching hours of Fergie interviews on Oprah, she did a lot of chat shows in the nineties and they're really compelling.”

In the new series, Fergie is persuaded to write her memoirs, before realising that she's already written them. Elsewhere Kate (played by Louise Ford) gets a job as a nightclub DJ, Wills (Hugh Skinner) tries to be a hands-on dad, hanging out with mums in the park, and Pippa (Morgana Robinson) has to decide between her stinking rich fiance Johnny or Prince Harry. “To spite Harry, Pippa’s run off with this psychopathic millionaire”, says Robinson. “It doesn’t really do the trick though because Harry’s not really switched on enough to realise that that’s the game.”

Unlike the rest of the cast, Robinson is an out-and-out impressionist – but she says her Pippa isn’t based on the real one. “She’s a complete fantasy. That was the note from the start, that it's not an impressions show, and I was very grateful for that. You’re much freer – the character is so farfetched.”

Robinson’s BBC2 impressions show, Morgana Robinson’s The Agency, hasn't been re-commissioned (she’s working on a sitcom with Matt Berry instead) – but her impersonations of men like Danny Dyer and Gregg Wallace led to a suggestion that she might play Donald Trump in the new series of The Windsors. “After Melissa McCarthy doing Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live it was batted around the office that I should play Donald Trump”, she says. “I’m glad I didn’t - I don't miss having tits strapped down, it’s just a world of pain.” Instead, the US actor Cory Johnson will play the 45th US President who helps out Harry Enfield’s Prince Charles in his hour of need,

Pippa Middleton’s real wedding in May came quicker than the writers had anticipated, while other nerve-wracking moments included the notification that Prince Philip was going to stand down from his official duties. “The big announcement that was coming, we weren’t really sure what that was going to be,” says George Jeffrie. “There was a bit of a worry that the Queen was going to abdicate, which might require some re-shooting.


 Enfield as Prince Charles and Gwynne as Camilla in The Windsors' 

“We also have Prince Harry’s new girlfriend, Meghan Markle, and we were a bit worried that they may announce a marriage before we start transmitting.

Some things we avoid. Eugenie is apparently on the verge of getting engaged but her boyfriend is a complete mystery. We don’t know anything about him so we don’t bother going near that.”

Jeffrie says their main sources of information are the Mail Online (“we’re addicts”) and Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography of Prince Charles. And there is absolutely no reaction to show from the Palace. “Their attitude to this kind of stuff tends to be indifference really – or certainly feigned indifference”, says Tyler-Moore. “Anyway, they’d be crazy to engage in some sort of debate with us over it.”

In any case, the writers tend to avoid the more sensitive issues, like Prince Harry’s wellbeing as revealed in Harry and William’s support for Heads Together, the campaign to remove the stigma from mental health. “It’s a tricky one, it’s such a sensitive issue,” says Jeffrie. “That came out too late anyway but I don’t think we'd necessarily have done anything about it.”

Richard Goulding plays Harry in The Windsors, just as he did in Mike Bartlett’s play (subsequently filmed by the BBC), King Charles III. “I thought the Harrys were very different”, says Tyler-Moore. “He was much more angst-ridden in King Charles III, where in our thing Wills tends to be the angst-ridden one – he’s really worried about his role.”

And in the new series, Will is also deeply concerned about the possible break-up of the United Kingdom – trying to use his charm and influence on Nicola Sturgeon, while Kate attempts to solve the drugs problem in Scotland by becoming an addict herself (and thus making it uncool). Prince Charles has his own problems, including a revolt by residents of his experimental town in Dorset, Poundbury, and the discovery of an unknown older brother.


 Prince William, played by Hugh Skinner, with Kate, played by Louise Ford

Back on set and Enfield’s Prince of Wales is quaffing ‘champagne’ (a mix of Shloer and Harrogate spring water, since you asked) with the Chinese premier, while Camilla (played by Haydn Gwynne) freezes out Fergie and her wretched juicers. The relationship between Camilla and Theresa May is, according to Bevan, going to be a “Dallas/Dynasty standoff in the soap tradition. We’re doing a cat fight tonight and Haydn is about a foot taller than me.

“Theresa thinks that frankly, the Royals are as thick as two planks, she’s very demeaning about them”, continues Bevan. “Camilla wants them to be friends, she tries to be friends, but no. The fact that you have our series and The Crown is amazing. People will watch both. My friends love both. It's so near the edge and yet it's quite touching as well. Everybody is quite sympathetic in a weird way.”

Indeed if you were a royalist you might be quietly pleased by the affection The Windsors shows towards its subject (albeit that Jeffrie also calls them his “target”). And if life is beginning to imitate art (Prince Harry snogging Meghan Markle at a recent polo match, for example, or Prince William ‘dad dancing’ at a Swiss nightclub), this is a soap that could run and run and easily outlast the coming Theresa May hegemony. “I wouldn’t describe it as satire. It’s more just mickey-taking really”, says Tyler-Moore. “Being soapy gives it a sort of warmth because the characters have got emotions and we sort of root for them a bit, I suppose.”

‘The Windsors’ returns to Channel 4 on 5 July