One thing I envy about the Royal family it is that I suspect no one ever tells them that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.

I have always rather enjoyed employing the pressure-releasing use of sarcasm. But my family are quick to castigate me for doing so.

It all dated back to my schooldays when the English teacher who first alerted me to the joys of our language used it mercilessly if we were foolish enough to ask a stupid question and expose ourselves to his withering scorn. 

He was exactly the kind of teacher that would struggle for official approval today. He was idiosyncratic, witty, charismatic and very funny.

We all wanted to please him and we learned a lot. But boy could he dismiss a faux pas elegantly. Mr Martin is no longer with us but I salute him.

But watching the fascinating programme this week when the Queen reminisced about her own and her father’s coronation, I couldn’t fail to notice how she had no qualms at all about delivering the coup de grace to any question from her courteous interviewer that she considered worthy of such dismissal.

‘What did your children do in the palace during your coronation?’, ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there’.

The hapless interviewer had been instructed to refrain from asking her direct questions, but to make statements or observations to which she could respond.

When he suggested that the bishops were there to hold the crown, she tartly replied ‘Oh really? I thought they were there to hold my clothes’.

Precisely the response the remark deserved perhaps, but given his being hamstrung by the protocol of the interview a rather easy target?

But the royals are constantly meeting people who are considerably less relaxed than they are and struggling to conform to behaviour that only exists in the rarefied climes of the House of Windsor.

In 1985, I was in a line up after the Royal Variety Show. I and a dozen other actors performed a Jack Buchanan number.

Prince Philip asked me how much rehearsal we had had. I told him the truth, that we had only all been there to rehearse that day.

His genial response was the one we would like to feel free to make in similar circumstances. ‘Bloody looked like it too!’

How I wish we lesser mortals could get away with such bluntness.