Harmony at Last 

There are many ways to describe Finding Harmony, the King’s earnest cinematic meditation on the state of the planet. Perhaps the most accurate is endless eco-drivel.

The film opens in the usual manner: soft light; hushed voiceovers; and the sense that something profoundly important is about to be said. We are told about the great industrial acceleration, the tripling of the population, depletion of resources and pressure on housing and the environment. Strangely, there is still plenty of room for immigrants.

Every so often in the film a passenger jet is seen making its way along a runway or streaking across the sky. The message regarding air travel is obvious, if unstated, yet there are no clips of His Majestic Eminence emerging from one of the many private jets of which he and his tribe of eco-lunatics make frequent use.

Back in 1970, we are reminded, the then-Prince gave a speech about pollution and expressed how profoundly concerned he was about all this. A man with two A levels and a lower second in History started lecturing the world on how it should be run. The popularity of his ideas is exemplified by scenes of Earth Day, the 1970 demonstration by the then rent-a-mob and assorted hippies. However, any direct link between these demonstrations and the utterances of Bonnie Prince Charlie is tenuous, to say the least.

We are whisked to Highgrove, the test bed for His Royalness’s ideas on harmony. We see the monarch gathering eggs, contemplating nature, and advising which potatoes to use to get the best crispy baked potatoes (which he ‘loves’). He jokes that these are red Duke of Yorks, the man’s a natural. And another jet slices across a perfect sky

The narrative is familiar: farming improves; the population grows unhindered; and then comes the inevitable ‘but’. Toxic pesticides, artificial fertilisers and the modern world generally behaving like a villain in a children’s cartoon.

Organic farming is presented not merely as a passion but as a kind of moral awakening. Then the famous episode of the future King reporting that he speaks to flowers and says that they speak to him. This led to allegations in the press that the man was cuckoo and, sadly for Charles, Finding Harmony does little to dispel that notion.

Of course, climate change is frequently mentioned and, unquestioningly, ascribed to human activities. Rest assured, however, it could be reversed by organic farming. The success of the King’s brand, Duchy Originals, made from produce grown on his organic farms is used to shore up the case.

As anyone who has seen Duchy Originals on the shelves at Fortnum & Mason will know, the products are expensive. The King has successfully achieved the problem of growing and manufacturing food for rich folk like himself. Quite how this solves the problem of feeding the rest of the world is obscure, to say the least.

We move next to Dumfries House, where the King hopes to heal the land and bring harmony to the surrounding community. We are told that raising the money for this project was a risk, a statement that might raise a smile among those of us whose own fundraising efforts do not involve calling a few billionaires and who do not have gongs and peerages to distribute.

Cue a hard luck story about Stuart, the hospitality manager, whose involvement with Dumfries House turned his life around for the better. Then, there is a montage of happy smiling faces of people eating and dancing at the house and walking in the gardens where they encounter ‘nature’, albeit a very well-manicured version of nature.

At one point, reference is made to harmony in the family which is a bit rich coming from an adulterous divorcee whose own family is in a chaotic state. Presumably he does not get questioned much by the fawning and sycophantic acolytes with which he surrounds himself.

Inexplicably, we are taken to HMP Bristol, where hardened criminals are tamed by their encounter with bees. One poor chap encountered one in his pocket to the accompaniment of much bleeping. This is all about harmony, we learn. We cut to the King wandering in his gardens sniffing this and pruning that and thanking God he has lived long enough to see it flourish.

At this point the film enters its more mystical phase. We are shown sand dunes, forests, seascapes, and the order of nature expressed through fractal geometry and geometrical shapes that look suspiciously Islamic. There are lots of temples and one church, which seems about right given what we know about the King’s defence of ‘faith’ as opposed to ‘The Faith’.

Architecture, one area where he has possibly expressed some good sense, is a battlefield. A clip from the famous ‘carbuncle’ speech is shown and we see Charles taking a wrecking ball to some ghastly concrete monstrosity. His answer to all this was to build his own town, Poundbury, which, it must be said, looks rather a nice place to live. Strangely, however, he doesn’t live there himself.

The King does not confine his projects to his own kingdom. Over in Kabul where, surely, they have enough problems, he is involved in reconstruction projects following the Afghan War. It is not made clear who destroyed the buildings in the first place. Suicide bombers are mentioned but not in connection with the destruction.

The King’s project, all carried out according to the precepts of sacred geometry, is so popular that women are allowed to work on it. No mention of what is happening to the remainder of the women in Kabul who are denied schooling and healthcare and must walk about peering out of a single slit in their burqa. Ask them about harmony and I suspect it is in short supply.

Then the global cast arrives. Al Gore enters, the omni cause himself, to remind us of the ozone layer hole, the Earth Summit in Rio, the Conference of Parties, the climate crisis, the uphill struggle, and, in case we were getting complacent, biodiversity. We are shown rain forests, though curiously with no mention of the vast swathes of one that was cut down to accommodate a recent climate summit.

The film’s global tour continues. The President of Guyana credits Dumfries House for inspiration and indigenous communities dispense ancient wisdom about harmony. The Earth Elders dispense copious New Age nonsense about nature, the earth and spirits. One imagines, for a flushing toilet and a colour TV these chaps would tell Charlie boy where to stick his harmony project.

Over all this float superimposed geometric designs, drifting across the screen like a subliminal screensaver. It is hard to believe how captive our King is to this symbolic gobbledegook.

We are whisked to India, to a project where water is stored in the ground. But how were the holes dug? Of course, using gas guzzling modern technology which even the documentary did not edit out. This is followed by a supposedly miraculous transformation of desert into oasis. Quite how long this took, or on what scale, is not explained. I cannot be alone in having my doubts.

The film begins and ends with the King viewing the documentary and making frankly inane – embarrassing even – comments such as telling us with great solemnity, that ‘we are nature ourselves’, a revelation that would have astonished absolutely nobody before about 1970.

The final scenes offer more forests, more sand, more seas, and then, inevitably, another plane. It is a fitting image: the world of harmony, punctured by the sound of jet engines, but somehow still convinced that everything could be set right if only we planted enough trees and spoke to our vegetables.

In the end, Finding Harmony is less a film than a royal sermon: part gardening programme, part architectural manifesto, part eco-theology. It is full of good intentions and noble sentiments. But it is also curiously detached from the messy realities it gestures toward, such as the corruption behind famines, the politics behind climate summits, the economics behind that very jet overhead.

Harmony must be easy to find when you live in a palace, grow organic potatoes on your own farm, and have Al Gore on speed dial. For the rest of us, the search continues.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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