Hollywood stars including Olivia Colman to perform King Charles’s speeches on the environment spanning more than 50 years
Hollywood stars including Olivia Colman are set to read out lines from King Charles’s speeches on the environment spanning more than 50 years.
Ms Colman – who played the Queen in The Crown – will appear alongside 18 other actors and environmentalists in a short film released today.
Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson and Idris Elba have also been recorded reading the King’s words, to mark the launch of a new YouTube channel for his RE:TV website.
A new short film, called The King’s Speech, released today will include the landmark speech given on February 19, 1970, when the young Prince Charles was only 21, to the Countryside Steering Committee for Wales.
In the speech – which the King has said people judged as ‘dotty’ and ‘completely potty’ at the time – he predicted the catastrophe of plastic waste, stating: ‘When you think that each person produces roughly 2lb of rubbish per day, and there are 55 million of us on this island using non-returnable bottles and plastic containers, it is not difficult to imagine the mountains of refuse that we shall have to deal with somehow.’
Hollywood star Olivia Colman – who played the Queen in The Crown – will appear alongside 18 other actors and environmentalists in a short film released today
In the speech – which the King has said people judged as ‘dotty’ and ‘completely potty’ at the time – he predicted the catastrophe of plastic waste
A preview clip for the new film has the voice of the King warning, in his opening speech at the 2020 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he met environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg, that: ‘Global warming, climate change and the devastating loss of biodiversity are the greatest threats humanity has ever faced.’
His voice is then spliced with that of Luther star Idris Elba, who is shown voicing the same words today.
The video is interspersed with footage of the effects of climate change, including wildfires, flooding and drought, and locations such as the glasshouses of Kew Gardens and ancient woodland of Burnham Beeches.
RE:TV was launched during Climate Week three years ago as a content platform for short films, with Charles as editor-in-chief.
It has produced more than 100 films highlighting innovations in response to the climate and biodiversity crisis.
In 2020, marking the 50th anniversary of his first important speech on the environment, Charles said it was met with bemusement, adding: ‘I was considered rather dotty, to say the least, for even suggesting these things, rather like when I set up a reed-bed sewage treatment system at Highgrove – that was considered completely mad.
‘Everything I suggested was completely potty, apparently.’
The Daily Mail has long campaigned on fighting waste with our Turn the Tide on Plastic Campaign.
Horticulturalist Danny Clarke (pictured: left) has joined a list of celebrities, including actor Woody Harrelson (pictured: right), to help environmentalists launch a new RE:TV YouTube channel
The preview of the new video also includes the King’s speech from the opening session of the important COP21 climate change conference in Paris in 2015, in which he said: ‘In damaging our climate, we become the architects of our own destruction.
‘While the planet can survive the scorching of the earth and the rising of the waters, the human race cannot.’
Oscar winner Olivia Colman, star of The Crown, then picks up other key themes from the speech, stating: ‘We have the knowledge, the tools and the money. We lack only the will.’
BBC gardening presenter Danny Clarke, author Charlie Mackesy, YouTube environmental campaigner Jack Harries and climate activist Leah Thomas also appear in the video.
At the end of the preview clip for the video, which is entitled The Speeches: 50 Years of Speaking Up For The Planet, the King is shown, from the original RE:TV launch film in 2020, concluding: ‘There is real hope, but we’ve just got to get our act together.’
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