A republican challenge

In this season of film awards, it's worth reminding the acting folk of the checklist. As my Guardian colleague Hadley Freeman has cheerfully noted, if you haven't played someone struggling with a disability or mental illness, a history of abuse and/or a foreign accent or, at the very least, homosexuality, put aside those Oscar dreams: it's not going to happen.

There is however a sub-category of advice for the British thespian: the path to Oscar runs through the British Royal Family's country home at Sandringham in the east of England, Windsor and London. A Brit who yearns for a statuette needs to go royal or, at the very least, aristo. Whether it's Helen Mirren pretending to be the Queen or Julian Fellowes serving up posh upstairs-downstairs fare in Gosford Park, faking blue blood is the secret of award success.

The latest beneficiary of the phenomenon is, of course, The King's Speech, which didn't just dominate the Bafta nominations but is tipped for greatness come Oscar night. Why do the Americans keep lapping up this stuff? Amateur psychology suggests it's a collective case of projection. Americans take an aspect of themselves they don't much like — in this instance, hierarchy and class difference — and dump it on someone else, in this instance the British.

For its part, The King's Speech depicts a world of bowing and scraping, each scene turning on the shocking improbability of a stammering royal needing the help of — and building a friendship with — a commoner speech therapist. Because it is set more than 70 years ago, we are assured that, though we may have been like this once, we are no longer. The stuffiness, the snobbery — that was then.

Except the world of The King's Speech is not entirely in our British past. For one thing, the current prime minister, mayor of London and a clutch of our current masters were educated in a fashion utterly recognisable to the men who ruled in 1939. As for deference to monarchy, that has hardly vanished.

To be sure, there are vast differences between then and now. There was a time when the authority of the royals rested on grandeur and strength (embodied in the film by George V). Then, in the postwar period, the royals shifted ground: presenting themselves as an extraordinary kind of ordinary family.

Winning our affection

The King's Speech suggests that in today's era, the royals can best win our affections in the manner favoured by so many celebrities — by revealing their struggles against adversity. So we warm to "Bertie" when we learn of his cold, abusive childhood — beaten because he was lefthanded, starved by a malevolent nanny. Thus the film extends the Dianification of the monarchy back two generations, asking us to hail George VI not for his majesty, but for his vulnerability.

For all that, the emotional core of the film lies elsewhere, specifically with the Second World War. If the king were only rehearsing for his coronation, we would hardly care. That he is preparing to address the nation on the outbreak of war is what gives the story its moral force. As such, The King's Speech is confirmation that the last war has now become Britain's defining narrative, almost its creation myth. What 1789 is to the French, what 1776 is to the Americans, 1940 is to the Brits — our finest hour when we stood alone against the Nazi menace. This is the period our children study in school; all history before is increasingly hazy. When we nominate our greatest Briton, we choose Winston Churchill.

As it happens, the Windsors are not the ideal bearers of this chapter of our island story. As the film makes clear, Edward VIII was an admirer of Hitler. As the film does not make clear, the rest of the royal family leaned towards appeasement. Even the sainted Bertie sent a message to the then foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, in the spring of 1939, expressing his hope that Jews — then desperate to get out of Germany — would be barred from doing so. Halifax listened to his king, sending word to Berlin urging the Nazi government "to check the unauthorised emigration" of Jews. (Such is the political intensity of Oscar season, this fact is being used as ammunition against The King's Speech by its rivals.) But George VI is not the royal in The King's Speech who matters most. That honour goes to a character who barely says a word: the young Princess Elizabeth. Her appearance in the film is striking, reminding us that today's Queen was present at events that have become not so much historic as mythic. Consider this fact: the Queen has met weekly with 12 prime ministers — and the first of these was Churchill, a figure as giant and remote from most younger Britons as Nelson or Wellington.

Living connection

This is central to the grip the Queen continues to exert on our collective imagination: she is a living connection to the event that has become our founding story, indeed, she is the last public figure anywhere in the world with a genuine tie to the Second World War. That, alongside a longevity which makes her a rare constant in the memories of young and old alike, is one reason why republicans will never find support for a move against her.

The King's Speech lays bare the scale of the challenge to those who would hope one day, after the Queen has gone, to replace the monarchy with something fair and democratic. They will not only have to win all the usual arguments about systems and votes — they will have to dislodge the Windsors from their role as chief vessels of our national memory.

It will not be easy, given the compelling, soap-operatic appeal of a family. It will mean asking audiences like those queuing up to see this elegant, affecting film to shift their focus away from the king and his speech — and towards the stories of all those millions of forgotten people who stood still and listened.