It’s amazing how much image-polishing the British ruling class has gotten away with, when you think about it! Generations of imperial murder, torture, rape, and plunder around the globe, and they’re rewarded with an endless procession of fawning tributes favoring their most prominent genocidal warthogs such as Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill.

And how about that ridiculous Windsor clan still cluttering up the British Isles? As the great Irish revolutionary Michael Collins once asked with justifiable irritation, “How did those people ever get an empire?”

If you’ve suffered as I have through this long media nightmare — and I have relatives that subscribe to Royalty Magazine, so you can imagine — The Favourite is a special holiday gift just for you: a weird and wonderful sod-off response to all the many lavish, solemn, toff-worshipping British “heritage films” and TV series centered on the domestic lives of royals and gentry and rich gits of all sorts.