You have to love Prince Charles – his sons are never out of the newspapers, his dead wife is a saint and his Mum is now a movie star, but good old Prince Charles is still plugging away, uncomfortably posing for photo-ops with poor people like always.
This time Prince Charles has zipped off to America on aeroplane and vast motorcade to accept an award from Al Gore, ironically for being so environmentally friendly. But a black-tie gala dinner and award ceremony isn't enough for Prince Charles, mainly because it didn't present him with enough opportunities to look clumsy, awkward and out of touch with people who don't wear clothes made out of swan feathers. And this time Prince Charles decided to set the global image of British people back 50 years by playing a stiff-jointed, cringe-worthy game of basketball with some Harlem teenagers while wearing a double-breasted suit. It's thought that only very strong words from his royal advisers prevented Prince Charles from following up the basketball game with a quick attempt to Ghostride The Whip in his limo.
Sometimes we feel a bit sorry for Prince Charles. It seems like everyone in his family can go off and do their own thing – like Prince Harry groping a girl's breasts or Queen Elizabeth being turned into the darling of Hollywood or even long-dead Princess Diana getting a creepy concert and almost doing it with David Hasselhoff – but Prince Charles is stuck in a kind of limbo, glumly waiting for his Mum to die so he can get to be the lame-duck monarch of a drizzly little island for a few years.
Not that Prince Charles has too much time to ponder this, though – his royal duties are enough to keep him busy. Admittedly 95% of these duties involve him using a walking stick to stop Rod Stewart humping Camilla's leg like a dog, but he gets to do plenty of other stuff, too – like going to America to show everyone how the Brits kick it, b-ball-style.
Ostensibly, Prince Charles' trip to America this weekend was all about receiving a Global Environmental Citizen Award from Lindsay Lohan's friend Al Gore to commemorate the fact that Charles was freaking about the environment way before anybody else – even if it did mean him flying on a 7,000 mile round trip complete with journeys in a limo escorted by several other vehicles to get there. To his credit, though, Prince Charles did decide to cancel a skiing trip to Switzerland to make up for all the carbon he used up to get to New York.
It's a shame that this damage-limiting foresight was lacking when Prince Charles went to visit Harlem to observe an after-school finance class for schoolchildren and a health clinic class about asthma, especially when he was challenged to shoot some hoops, as CBS reports:
Charles and Camilla also watched a rehearsal for a Shakespeare play and a basketball practise. Charles, wearing a blue double-breasted blue suit, blue shirt and striped tie, attempted two shots. He missed the first but made the second, drawing applause. "My son was up all night waiting for this," said Arona Pratt, the mother of one of the players. Pratt said Camilla, who wore a brown coat with a beaded collar and leopard print cuffs, "is pretty."
It doesn't take a genius to work out where this is going. Prince Charles is jealous that thanks to Helen Mirren in The Queen, his mother is now the toast of the town, and now Charles wants a slice of the action. We're not entirely sure of the commercial appeal of a remake of Space Jam starring a stuffy 59-year-old aristocrat instead of Bugs Bunny, but you can't blame a man for trying.
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Bazookatron says
That man… he’ll be our king one day, and images of him playing basketball in Harlem will be on the back of our money.