Now we know why Queen Elizabeth II banned BBC's 1969 documentary Royal Family

The Daily Beast

The behind-the-scenes documentary that was the focus of a Season 3 episode of The Crown has been banned for more than 50 years. But it recently surfaced on YouTube, and The Daily Beast's Tim Teeman got to watch it before the BBC had it taken down. "It isn’t that Royal Family reveals any juicy secrets, but more that it lifts the veil of mystery around royal ritual, daily royal life and process, and around the royals themselves," says Teeman. "A lot of the film shows the glamour of royal tours and the inside of the palace as more akin to an office job—if that office job involved appearing to screaming crowds and deciding which fabulous tiara to wear. Royal Family makes the royal mystique ordinary, revolutionary for a time when the family was lavished with privacy. It also zeroes in physically and personally more than any documentary—including those made in modern, and what we think of as more intrusive, times—on the queen and her family. Its access is beyond what a documentary-maker would get now, or what the queen would allow—and probably so because this was made in a time pre-reality TV, pre-notions of 'access.' Royal Family has the air of an original, a curio. It brings royal pomp respectfully crashing down to earth."