Ignore them at your peril; this crowd know what they like. The last thing they really took to was the book A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which was subsequently taken up by other age groups and became the pool-side read of last summer.

It is a point worth returning to, and I'm sure there is money to be made in here somewhere: the old are so savvy, so leisured and so damned healthy these days, that it's difficult to see the point of those focus group chappies canvassing opinions from anyone else.

The middle aged are too busy to go to see The Queen, either on celluloid or in real life. We catch everything, a great deal later, on DVD. The young probably won't bother going to see a film about an old lady who rules another country.

So in this case, as in so many others, the OAPs are the rock and roll generation who can make or break a film in this jurisdiction.

And the Queen is one of their number: our old people remember when her father died, the day she got married and the day she was crowned. No wonder they are interested in a film about her.

(Although not as interested as my grandmother and her sister, who drove to Newry to see a newsreel report of the coronation, ignoring the advice of the IRA, which had threatened to bomb any cinema in the republic which showed the newsreel, and the derision of all their male relatives. ) Anyway that's enough about old people . . . although like all cultural pioneers they seem to be everywhere, all of a sudden. At the risk of turning this column into rather a long series about Helen Mirren (now there's an idea) it is time to talk about royalty.

Royalty still exerts a strange fascination on an enormous number of this republic's citizens. I am not being snotty about it . . . I would have been the first one into the car to Newry if I had been alive at the time of the coronation. I can clearly remember the eerie silence which fell on Dublin the day that Prince Charles married Diana Spencer. I even worry about Princess Caroline, who is only royal by the skin of her teeth. Her husband looks a bit dodgy, you know.

Now this rather shaming interest has been examined, if not really explained, in a new book by Jeremy Paxman (love Jeremy: he is telly royalty). It is full of inconsequential royal stories. Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria: "I'm the Emperor and I want dumplings!" It is a catalogue of frightful marriages, and none more frightful than that between George IV and Caroline of Brunswick, who loathed each other from the start.

When Napoleon died in 1821 a lackey went to tell George IV that his greatest enemy was dead. To which the king replied "Is she, by God!" As we can see, royals seem unaccountably fond of exclamation marks. I suppose it comes from having no fear.

In fact the book shows how ordinary and boring most royals are. It is the Queen of England's very ordinariness, combined with her stamina, which makes her so popular amongst her own generation, across the world.

According to Jeremy Paxman it was the Marxist writer, Tom Nairn, who came up with the best way of describing the common person's attraction to royalty when he wrote, rather exasperatedly, that monarchy exudes "an apparently inexhaustible electric charge". In this celebrity age this is not as strange an idea as it once would have been. However, even the most devoted royal fans have doubts about the inexhaustibility of the electrical charge around Prince Charles. That's going to be another type of film altogether.