Thirty years ago, I was reviewing television for the weekly trade magazine Broadcast. My benign editor, Pattie Williams, gave me carte blanche to cover whatever I wanted and to arrange the material how it suited me. I soon fell into a pattern of pulling together all the recent dramas in one column, the last few weeks’ documentaries in another, then various current affairs programmes and so on.
The one area I rarely wrote about was outside broadcasts. It is in the nature of OBs that the subject matter is rarely initiated by the television companies. Almost always, OB cameras are present at an event that would be taking place whether the cameras were there or not, most commonly sporting fixtures. Sport anyway makes my teeth hurt – though we’ll sit through quite a bit of BBC2’s coverage of the Masters from Augusta tomorrow and Sunday nights. But in all but the rarest case, OBs are not very interesting televisually, that is to say qua television.
I always tried to write about television in a way that focussed on the medium itself. Hence, when covering those programmes that originated in television – drama, dockos, sitcom and so on – I attended greatly to the distinctions between various directors and producers. I wrote quite as much of how one sees as about what one sees. In sum, what I was really writing about was the medium and its programme-making rather than (as so many critics, supremely Clive James, did) the world seen through the television window. I felt that I was treating my subject rather as a good book critic writes about literature and the writing of books rather than the details of plot in a novel or the niceties of argument deployed in non-fiction.
As the wedding of HRH the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer loomed, Pattie asked me gently if I planned to write about the coverage. I didn’t need to ponder before I said no and she accepted that with good grace. (I may misremember but I have a feeling that she commissioned someone else to write a one-off piece, to accompany rather than to supplant my own column).
A large public event like a royal wedding or a state funeral allows little scope for creative thought on the part of broadcasters unless the Palace itself decides to tinker with the format. So, for the editor in charge of coverage, the line producer and the director(s), it is far more of a logistical than an artistic exercise. Hungry newspapers try to build stories out of which celebs have been dragged in to give their precious views (anyone remotely famous who sounds English but hasn’t already been signed up by an American network for this month’s royal wedding has clearly missed a trick). But in truth there is very little mileage in the story of what television companies plan for their respective broadcasts, save for stuff about the cost.
Quite apart from the event’s lack of interest in purely televisual terms, I found no personal interest in it. My line at the time of the 1981 hullabaloo was: “I’m a Socialist, a republican, a humanist and a homosexual. What is there for me in a royal wedding?”
There have been a few of these things in my time. Six months to the day after my birth, HRH Princess Elizabeth married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN. Few of the groom’s relatives attended. All of his sisters were married to Germans so they were not invited so soon after the war. Most of the nation followed the event on the wireless. Those few who owned television sets will have seen a sprinkling of live shots from outside Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. Later in the evening, a compilation of swiftly developed and edited film of the procession was broadcast.
It was not until the coronation of Princess Elizabeth as Queen in 1952 that the BBC had the resources to mount full coverage of the day’s events, including shots inside the Abbey. It was this transmission that established the medium as something everyone wanted to follow. A million sets were sold in the UK that year.
As well as the Prince of Wales, four of Her Majesty’s other relatives have elected to marry on television – and all but one of them (the now widowed Princess Alexandra) to divorce (not on television). The Queen’s youngest child, the Earl of Wessex, had a quiet ceremony at St George’s Chapel, Windsor and also remains wed.
I sat through the televised marriage of Princess Margaret to the trendy photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960. We had the day off school and my mother, a great royalist, decreed that watching was mandatory. The thing about it that has stayed with me most vividly is a remark by that swishy old queen Norman Hartnell about his design for the bride’s gown: “All the work is under the dress”. That seemed to me then and still seems a perfect evocation of the art that conceals art.
Otherwise, I have avoided these atavistic marathons of non-television in which the merest platitude is uttered and then repeated as if a pearl of boundless price. In The Guardian the other day, various writers who think themselves wits were listing the supposedly subversive events that they plan to attend on the day that HRH Prince William plights his troth with Miss Catherine Middleton. How absurd. It’s like refusing to step into a church to look at the impressive Norman architecture because you’re an atheist. If you’re going to attend an anti-street party, you may as well go to a real one. To the question “what are you doing on April 29th?", my answer would be: “I’ve no idea, it’s three weeks away”.
At the Charles’n’Di do, the most interesting nugget was the lack of an invitation issued to the bride’s step-grandmother, that great, quivering pink blancmange of a romantic novelist, Barbara Cartland. No doubt someone advised of the likelihood that she would upstage most of the royal family, if not the Queen Mum herself. That of course would have made it worth a few moments of dipping into.
At the end of my Broadcast review of other (now forgotten) programming, I explained in a brief paragraph why I would not be covering the royal wedding. I ended by observing that “the wedding without Barbara Cartland will be like Hamlet without the Player Queen”. I thought this was a rather adroit witticism that would be repeated widely but it never was. I put that down to the narrow circulation of the magazine. Probably now it will go viral (whatever that means).
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