The King's Head
The internet is awash with clickbait articles reminding us of the passage of time; the year 1999 is now 25 years ago, for example, and if you’re the same age as me, it’s deeply uncomfortable to realise that you’re the age that John Lithgow was when he played the uptight dad who disapproves of dancing in “Footloose.”
The fact that time is always moving forward at one second per second - or one year per year, or whatever your preferred metric - should inure us to the process, but sometimes it can still surprise us. Did you know, for example, that nobody knows what Prince Charles looks like?
I don’t have any empirical data to back this up, but its the only reason I can see that would possibly explain why we’re about to spend eight million pounds of taxpayers money putting his picture in every public building.
Prince Charles - or King Charles, as he is now that the wokeratti have managed to change the gender and pronouns of even the monarchy - used to be globally recognised, but apparently now he’s so forgotten that we’re going to have to hang his picture everywhere as a reminder of who he is. I can only assume it will come with a name tag, or ideally a big arrow saying THE KING and pointing at him in case there’s any residual confusion.
Even if we do need reminding, eight million seems like an expensive way to get us to remember what Charlie Tres looks like. I’ve done some quick calculations on better ways to go about it, in case anyone at the Palace wants my input.
(…They don’t.)
Money!
There are roughly seventy million people in the UK, and we live in an increasingly cash-free society. I actually can’t remember the last time I had paper money, but when I did, it definitely still had pictures of the late Queen on it. I’ve never seen a note or a coin with Charles’ face on it.
Charles could change all of this with… Well, change. Eight million divided among seventy million people means he could send everyone eleven pence in the post. A 10p and a penny, or five 2p coins and a penny, or two 5p pieces… You get the idea. Eleven pence might not be much but it’s more money than any member of the royal family has ever sent me in my life, and again: I’m as old as the Dad in “Footloose.”
Obviously, this idea would involve the monarchy giving British citizens some of their own money back, and they hate that, so it’s probably a no. But let’s keep working on it.
Drugs!
Maybe they Royals don’t even need to send us money - they just need to launch some sort of sponsorship deal with illegal narcotics.
According to recent studies, the UK is absolutely awash with cocaine, to the point where scientists at one point had to check that the amount of coke in British sewers wasn’t damaging the health of fish. (It wasn’t.) This means that as fewer and fewer people use cash to pay for things, the most common use for a bank note will soon be recreational rather than transactional, if that isn’t the case already.
The ad slogan writes itself. Next time you do charlie, think of Charlie! It’s even got a nice historical synchronicity, as the British monarchy have long enjoyed exploiting the people of South America and stealing their valuable plant products.
Paedophiles!
In 2005, national treasure Rolf Harris painted a portrait of the Queen, an event which was televised in order to warm the hearts of a nation.
Later, it transpired that Rolf had been doing a lot more than just warming people’s hearts, and that the other body parts he’d been interacting with were attached to underage girls. He served three years in prison - during which he attempted to record a song about how it was the fault of the girls who had accused him - and everyone has largely agreed to forget about him.
I’m not saying that Charles should get Rolf Harris to paint his portrait - Harris is ninety-four years old and dead, for starters - but if he were still around he’d probably be desperate for work and willing to do the job for a pittance. The current Royal Photographer, in a shocking oversight for a working professional, doesn’t list his rates on his website, but he’s personally worth an estimated twelve million pounds so we have to assume he isn’t cheap.
Portraits by accredited artists start at about £1500, according to Google, and you’d have to assume that a pederast portrait painter would do the job a lot cheaper than one who isn’t going to be pelted with stones and spat on in public.
There isn’t much of a moral issue for Charles here, given his friendly relationship with Jimmy Savile, who famously acted as an advistor to him on his failed marriage to Diana, amongst other things.
It shouldn’t be too hard for Charles to find a disgraced child molester in need of work - it would just be a case of teaching Andrew to paint.
Obviously, a painting is a one-off affair, but a quick Google tells me that there are 13,900 buildings owned by the UK government. Presumably, these are the ones that will be receiving a picture of Chucky Cubed. Ryman's stationers are offering A4 sized colour photocopies for thirty pence a time, if you order more than a thousand copies, so the whole thing could be accomplished for about four grand. Except that the copies would then have to be posted, and that brings me to the next idea.
Stamps!
A "large letter" first class postage stamp costs £1.95, and I really must be getting old because that seems extortionate to me. Nonetheless, posting an A4 picture of the King, produced by someone who may or may not be a child predator, and photocopied at Ryman's, will apparently cost £1.95. Or £1.55 for second class post if we're not in any hurry, but I don't think the Palace will be willing to take the cheap option.
Obviously, this makes things slightly redundant. Stamps already have a picture of the King on them. We might as well save ourselves time, money and the artistic efforts of a pederast and just send everyone in the UK a stamp, free of charge.
Interestingly, I can’t find any data on whether or not the Royals have to pay for postage, but historically they didn’t, and given that they’re exempt from things like taxes, discrimination laws and passports, I’m going to bet that the King gets to send mail for free and that he could use this perk to send everyone a stamp.
This way, nobody will have any excuse for not knowing what the King looks like. As an added bonus, we can all use the stamps to send each other a letter, which will encourage literacy and social interaction, two things which we're often told are on the decline. The only people left who might be unaware of the King's physical appearance would then be the homeless, so we're going to have to have teams of people going around in vans with a picture of the King, showing it to any vagrants that they find. In fact, to save on costs, they could just show the homeless their stamps.
Perhaps this won't save much - there are seventy-six cities in the UK, and if we pay two people per city (one to drive the van, one to get out and show people the stamp), and assume that they'll be doing it for a month at minimum wage, we're looking at just under seventy grand for the whole project. And that doesn't factor in fuel costs or van hire.
Clearly, we're going to have to streamline the process. We may need a painting after all, and to save on fuel (and keep the always-ecologically-minded monarch happy) we can swap the van for a bike. Maybe a tandem bike (£750 for 30 days rental), so that there's room for the painting in the middle; one guy can steer and the guy on the back can hold up the painting and tell people to look at it as they pass. We'd only need seventy-six photocopies of the painting, although it would make sense to go for a larger size for clarity, so seventy-six A3 pictures of the King would work out to £106.40.
The simplest solution would be to put up pictures of the King in homeless shelters, but this is a non-starter. Large groups of people at soup kitchens being made to look at a picture of a man on a throne in a gold hat is a recipe for revolution, something that monarchs are historically keen to avoid.
Movies!
The King and Camilla already appeared in Eastenders a couple of years ago, although fame is fickle so people may have forgotten. If we assume that another appearance now that he's king is necessary, the standard rate of pay for a speaking role is about £130. He doesn't need to say much - "Hello, I'm the King and this is my face" should cover it - but that should present him to a sizeable chunk of the public.
Of course, not everyone watches Eastenders, so it might be worthwhile trying to get him a small role in a blockbuster movie. The three most successful films last year were Barbie, the Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Oppenheimer.
Super Mario is animated so we can rule that out, and unless my script for Oppenheimer 2: Bomb This! gets picked up then a sequel seems unlikely, meaning we'll have to try to get Charles into the Barbie sequel somehow. A one-day role with a line in a Hollywood movie pays about a thousand dollars, although he will have to join the union.
In the unlikely event that Hollywood refuses to have a sitting monarch appear in a Barbie movie in order to break the fourth wall and tell the viewer who he is, Britain has something of an ace up its sleeve.
The UK is a very popular destination for filming, and a large billboard in Piccadilly circus - a location that is used in countless films - is £727 per week. That means that with the eight million we have to spend, we could put up a billboard for the next eleven thousand weeks and force Charles' face into every movie that's shot in the capital until the year 2235. If we put up the billboard for anything less than two hundred and eleven years, we're in profit.
All Of The Above!
There are plenty of sound ideas here1, but the brief was to try to save money. Totalling up, it seems like we could pay the King to be in a major film, a popular TV show, have him painted by a disgraced celebrity and/or his brother, hire people to cycle around every major city with a picture of him for a month, telling everyone to look at it, and still have enough money left to rent a billboard for so long that it would be taken down within the lifetime of Captain fucking Kirk.
Thank god things are going so well that there aren’t any better uses for the money.
No, there aren’t.