Rolf Harris, the elderly Australian entertainer with the catchphrase "WHY? Why did it have to DIE?" more famous for making funny noises by slapping his face, has painted the Queen.

Rolf Harris didn’t actually paint the Queen – he didn’t go and rub a sloppy roller all over her stern monarch face. Rolf painted a portrait of the Queen. And he’s even made her smile – something which hasn’t happened since the time in 1971 when she saw her Corgi bite a poor person on the testicles.

Rolf Harris (CDs) – who taught children to laugh at cartoons with his
1980s TV show Rolf’s Cartoon Club, and pensioners to cry at dead
animals with his 1990s TV show Animal Hospital – was granted two
special one-hour sittings with the Queen for a BBC One documentary.

Now, if we were Rolf Harris, we’d have painted two slightly
different pictures of the Queen, rolled one around a giant pencil and
moved it backwards and forwards to make it seem like the Queen was
doing a robot dance. Or got a giant book and drawn lots of little,
slightly different pictures of the Queen in the bottom corner, so that
when you flicked through the book you saw a little cartoon of the Queen
doing a poo and laughing.

But Rolf Harris bottled it – he just pained a normal portrait of the
Queen. Even if he did try to make her look more like a man who stuffs
mashed-up entrails into animal gut. Rolf says:

“I had a problem with the teeth; it looked as
though they were sitting on the bottom lip. I had to muck about with
those teeth over and over again… It was a bit stressful when I couldn’t get the likeness right.
And the first rough one that I did was exactly that, just a rough idea
where the eyes were and the mouth. It sort of looked like a pork
butcher from Norwich; it didn’t look like the Queen at all.”

Rolf Harris made it his quest to paint the Queen looking like something other than the hard-faced battle axe that she often appears to be. And, although he didn’t get the wobble board out, he did try and make the Queen giggle like a schoolgirl.

“I asked her to look out of the window and then
turn towards me as though greeting a treasured relative. I didn’t want
her to have a rictus smile.”

The Rolf Harris Queen portrait goes on display today at The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. The Queen is said to have murmured “It’s a very friendly painting,” when she saw it. Prince Phillip hasn’t officially commented on the painting, but probably thinks it looks like it was drawn by a bunch of naked black African cannibals in top hats or something.

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[story by Stuart Heritage]