Colin Firth plays the future monarch struggling to address the 1925 Empire exhibition in The King’s Speech. Photograph: Momentum Films

From as early as I can remember until 1952, when I left home at the age of 18 to go into the army, there was an annual ritual on the afternoon of Christmas Day. Dinner, which meant turkey and all the trimmings followed by plum pudding, began around two o'clock and was carefully timed to end so that everyone could sit there beneath the paper decorations, wearing the hats that came out of the crackers, and earnestly, reverently listen to the king's Christmas message on the radio.

This hallowed national tradition, initiated by Sir John Reith in 1932, was not five years old when George V, who'd given four of them, died. His successor Edward VIII's landmark contribution to broadcasting was his 1936 abdication speech: there was no Christmas message that year. So the first one I heard George VI give must have been in 1937 when I was four. He'd been filmed at his coronation earlier that year, an event I would have been taken to see by my parents in newsreels at a cinema in Leicester.

For the next 15 years, six of them during wartime, there was a special unease all over the country, indeed all over the Commonwealth and Empire. Listeners wondered if the king would make it to the end, as if he were precariously carrying words like a drunken waiter crossing a polished floor bearing a tray laden with wine glasses. Because George had a severe speech impediment, the nation

View the Original article

or subscribe in as a reader