Duke Ellington and British Royalty, and the BBC's Dancing On The Edge

I'm looking forward to the new BBC Drama "Dancing on the Edge", which begins on Monday, BBC 2, 9pm. (Updates: I was looking forward to it. The first episode was a disappointment. Musically and dramatically bland and unconvincing. But see review in The Independent. I'm afraid I agree with A.A.Gill's
damning review in The Sunday Times Culture magazine on 10 February: "a towering Babel of syncopated incoherence...None of the characters is remotely believable..The assorted toffs who come on to patronise and mate with the colonials wouldn't get hired by Downtown Abbey as chambermaids...this sort of incoherent, arch, mannered, pouty intellectualism looks, not just dull, but risibly, achingly, pretentiously dull". Spot on! Read the whole review if you can. It's much better written than Stephen Poliakoff's TV series, to judge from the first episode (one episode was much more than enough).

Update, Sunday Times Culture Section, 24 February. Other viewers seem to agree (I gave up after the first episode):

10 March, 2013:

According to The Daily Telegraph (Hannah Furness) "One of the scenes is inspired by a genuine event in which the then Prince of Wales attended a party with Duke Ellington, the big band leader, and ended up playing the drums 'for hours' in front of incredulous spectators."

Why incredulous? For the Duke's view of British Royalty, see the quotation from our 1965 interview (conducted in Bournemouth) above. It was published in an Oxford University student magazine (Oxymoron, December 1965).

Duke Ellington Memorial, New York