It was an undoubted success – even if the man in charge of the television cameras who was meant to press the “censor” button to prevent any too intrusive close-ups during the ceremony got carried away by the occasion and failed to do so. The viewers will have thanked him for it. Nor was it only people in Britain who were able to enjoy the spectacle. Since satellite link-ups had yet to be invented, Canberra jet bombers were used to fly film recordings of the day’s events to America and Canada.
The televising of the coronation not only enhanced the new Queen’s popularity, it also provided a boost for the young BBC. Almost overnight the number of licence-fee holders who provided its revenue doubled to three million. Equally importantly, the public-service broadcaster had established itself as the medium on which to watch great public events – preferably narrated by Richard Dimbleby, whose whispering delivery became synonymous with royal coverage.
The relationship between these two great British institutions had begun, and from the beginning the BBC played the role of a loyal subject. In the late 1950s the Corporation banned from its airwaves the writer Lord Altrincham after he provoked a controversy by suggesting in an obscure journal that the Queen’s court was too upper-class and described her style of speaking as “a pain in the neck”. The same fate befell another critic, Malcolm Muggeridge, who compared the lives of the royal family to a soap opera. Both men were obliged to state their cases on ITV, the new commercial service, instead.
For the time being at least, the Christmas speech was confined to radio, but in 1957 the Queen was seen as well as heard for the first time. Such a development was far from automatic, however. Although she agreed to have cameras in the Abbey, it was quite another thing to have them intruding on her family Christmas – since, like its radio equivalent, the television version was to be broadcast live. Again, however, the palace had to bow to the inevitable, not least because the spread of television ownership had caused the ratings for her radio broadcast to dip alarmingly. In the event the broadcast proved a resounding success: sixteen and a half million people watched the three p.m. broadcast. From then on, watching – rather than just seeing – the Queen became an important part of Britons’ Christmas Day ritual.
Europe’s other royals also give speeches during the holiday season, although in Denmark and Norway it is on New Year’s Eve. In both cases this is in effect a continuation of a tradition begun during the Second World War, when their then rulers made rousing speeches to their respective nations from exile in London.
As Europe entered the media age, other events began to be televised – especially royal weddings, starting with that of Prince Rainier of Monaco and Grace Kelly in 1956 – which, as seen earlier, was a true media sensation. The audiences, meanwhile, soared. The marriage of Princess Margaret to Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960, also in Westminster Abbey, attracted an estimated three hundred million viewers worldwide. That number had risen to five hundred million by June 1976 when King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden married Silvia Sommerlath.
Then in July 1981 came the biggest one of them all: the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. It was taken for granted that when Diana died sixteen years later, the television cameras should not only follow her funeral procession through London but also broadcast the service from inside Westminster Abbey. The marriage of Crown Prince Victoria of Sweden to Daniel Westling in June 2010 was also a major spectacle; Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton in April 2011 was even bigger still.
Churchill, with his opposition to the televising of the coronation, was wrong: the ability of people to follow royal occasions – both joyful and sad – on television did the royal brand no harm. It soon became clear, however, that such set-piece events would not be enough to satisfy the demands of the modern media, who were increasingly keen to portray members of their respective royal families as flesh-and-blood humans rather than as mere symbols. Conveniently, this coincided with a move by the various dynasties to portray themselves as the leading family of the nation.
In Britain this process had already begun in the late 1920s, when the young Princess Elizabeth became a media star, with newspapers and magazines on both side of the Atlantic keen to publish stories and photographs – often with the encouragement of the royal family, which appreciated their publicity value. Extraordinarily, the third birthday of baby “Lilibet”, as Elizabeth was known in the family, was considered an important enough occasion to earn her a place on the cover of Time magazine on 21st April 1929 – even though her father, at that stage, was not even heir to the throne.
Other royal families were pursuing a similar course: after the birth of the future Queen Beatrix in 1938, her father Prince Bernhard supplied the Dutch newspapers with his own photographs of her, which appeared on the front pages. He also shot some amateur movie footage of his daughter’s first steps, which was turned into a film, Ons prinsesje loopt (Our Princess Walks), which was a box-office hit when it came out at cinemas the following year.
In Denmark, Queen Ingrid, the Swedish-born wife of King Frederik IX, also had a keen appreciation of the importance of public relations for the monarchy. The couple’s marriage in 1935 had been one of the major media events of the day. After her husband came to the throne in 1947, Ingrid, by then the mother of three young daughters, strove to make the Danish monarchy more media-friendly and shift attention away from the King alone to the royal family as a whole. Danish newspapers and magazines began to fill with photographs of the family; cosy gatherings turned to public-relations events. The Queen even gave permission to Ebba Neergard, her hofdame (lady-in-waiting), to publish a book of private photographs of the three princesses.
One of the more unusual fruits of the Danish royal family’s media strategy was a special unrehearsed children’s radio programme in 1949 that allowed an estimated one million listeners to eavesdrop on Frederik’s tea with Ingrid and their children. During the show the King could be heard telling Margrethe, the future Queen, who was a few months short of her ninth birthday, to take her feet off the table. His children, Frederik told his interviewer, were “as charming as anyone else’s” but they could also be very noisy on occasion, “so that sometimes you feel you could strangle them”. He also gave an insight into his working life, with its rounds of meetings with ministers, public audiences and daily signings of documents. “Sometimes I work late, but when one has a charming wife and charming kids, there is no reason for complaint,” he concluded.7
This merely whetted the appetite for more ambitious fly-on-the-wall television documentaries, which have become commonplace across Europe in the past few years. One of the most notable was Richard Cawston’s Royal Family, a programme made by the BBC to accompany the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales in July 1969. In the most famous scene he and the family are seen having a barbecue beside a loch at Balmoral, their Scottish home. While Prince Charles mixes salad dressing, Prince Philip grills the sausages. In another scene, Prince Charles is playing the cello when a string snaps, hitting his younger brother Edward in the face. The family are shown eating lunch and decorating their Christmas tree; the Queen even visits a shop.
The project had been prompted by demand from broadcasters from across the world for footage of the Prince ahead of his inauguration. Given that Charles, at that early stage in his life, had not actually done very much, it was decided instead to make a film that looked more broadly at monarchy and its role. It also appears to have coincided with a desire by the royal family to show themselves in public amid criticism from some commentators who saw them as out of step with the more liberal atmosphere of the 1960s.
According to one account by a former courtier who had a small part in the film, Prince Philip was a driving force behind the project, which he hoped would reveal quite how much his wife and the rest of the family did for the nation. “We were saying, ‘Hey fellers, this is the Queen,’” the courtier said. “This is a year in the life of the Queen. And it isn’t all gilt coaches and Rolls-Royces, balls and
banquets and champagne. It’s bloody hard work, and this film reveals what sort of hard work it is.”8 In other words, it was all about people involved in running a family business, but doing so with a sense of humour and fun.
For Cawston, one of the most serious problems was being allowed to film some of the scenes. “Get away from the Queen with your bloody cameras,” Philip barked at him during the Balmoral barbecue. An even greater obstacle was the reluctance of the family, whose public comments were traditionally confined to reading carefully prepared speeches, to allow their unscripted conversations to be recorded.
The programme went to the heart of the delicate balancing act that the royal family faced: trying on the one hand to allow enough access to give an insight into their lives while showing enough restraint to “to preserve the mystique”. Just in case it all went wrong, the palace was promised a right of veto – although it didn’t need to exercise it.
It was still a high-risk strategy, as David Attenborough, who was at the time the BBC’s director of programmes, pointed out to Cawston in appropriately anthropological terms. “You’re killing the monarchy, you know, with this film you’re making,” he said. “The whole institution depends on mystique and the tribal chief in his hut. If any member of the tribe ever sees inside the hut, then the whole system of the tribal chiefdom is damaged and the tribe eventually disintegrates.”9
Milton Shulman, television critic for the Evening Standard, expressed similar sentiments. “Is it, in the long run, wise for the Queen’s advisers to set as a precedent this right of the television camera to act as an image-making apparatus for the monarchy?” he asked. “Every institution that has so far attempted to use TV to popularize or aggrandize itself has been trivialized by it.”10
In terms of ratings, Royal Family, broadcast first on the BBC and repeated a week later on ITV, was a great success: as many as two-thirds of the population are believed to have watched one or other of the two screenings, an extraordinary figure even for an era when there were just three television channels. So what of its longer-term effects on the monarchy? In one sense, by allowing the cameras to record them in such informal moments the royal family were blurring the distinction between the public and private, which effectively paved the way for the more invasive and personalized reporting of their lives that has followed. As one contemporary observer put it, the sight of Prince Philip cooking sausages meant that thereafter people would want to see and hear everything. Even so, it would be going too far to blame the programme alone for the public-relations disasters that befell the Windsors in the 1990s.
Surprisingly for such a significant film, it has not been shown again since. Researchers are allowed to view it, but only with prior permission from Buckingham Palace. Other royal documentaries are allowed to use only short clips – although not of the celebrated barbecue scene (even though snippets of it have popped up on YouTube). When the National Portrait Gallery put on an exhibition, The Queen: Art and Image, to mark the Diamond Jubilee, it was allowed only a ninety-second extract.
Other television films setting out to show the everyday life of the royal family have followed in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. In Denmark, Jacob Jørgensen, head of JJ Film, a production company, appeared to break new ground in 1995 with Årstider i kongehuset (The Seasons of the Royal Family) a series of four sixty-minute films that tracked a year in the life of the royal family and their staff. JJ Film has made something of a speciality of such shows and has produced more than twenty films featuring the Danish royals, establishing a close relationship with the family. Quite how close this relationship was became clear when it emerged that Jørgensen’s cameraman son Martin fell for Alexandra, the wife of Prince Joachim, the younger of the Queen’s two sons, after apparently meeting during the making of one of the programmes. Alexandra was divorced in 2005 and married her new love, who is fourteen years her junior, in March 2007.
In Sweden meanwhile the Bernadotte dynasty’s two hundredth anniversary in 2010 was marked with a six-part documentary entitled Familjen Bernadotte. To make the programmes, Gregor Nowinski, a documentary film-maker, was given unprecedented access to the royal family, following them at work and play for two years and conducting a number of in-depth interviews.
While most such projects appear to have been well received, there was one notable exception: an execrable one-off version of the popular slapstick game It’s a Knockout, organized by a twenty-three-year-old Prince Edward in June 1987 in what was his first foray into television. The programme raised more than a million pounds for various royal-backed charities, but many traditionalists were appalled by the sight of Edward, Princess Anne and the Duke and Duchess of York presiding over competitions between various film, television and sports stars, including John Travolta, Rowan Atkinson and Meat Loaf – all of them dressed in medieval costumes. The programme did not do much for Edward’s reputation: at a news conference afterwards, the Prince asked the journalists present what they had thought of the show. The response was nervous laughter, prompting an angry Edward to storm out.
While members of the British royal family proved reluctant to hold themselves up to such ridicule again, there were plenty of others prepared to do it for them. In the early 1960s the popular television programme That Was the Week That Was, presented by a young David Frost, lampooned the royal family along with other parts of the establishment. Private Eye, launched in 1961, responded to the royal family documentary by referring to them by working-class nicknames: the Queen became Brenda, Prince Charles was nicknamed Brian and the Diana character, when she came on the scene later, named Cheryl. This was taken a step further in the 1980s by Spitting Image, which cruelly parodied the royal family. Prince Charles was shown talking to flowers, Prince Philip was portrayed as a buffoon always in naval uniform, and the Queen Mother, who elsewhere in the media had long since attained the status of national treasure, was generally seen with a bottle of Gordon’s Gin in one hand and a copy of the Racing Post in the other. In Sweden, meanwhile, Hey Baberiba, a comedy-impressions show launched in 2005, included a regular strand, “Familjen”, in which actors impersonated members of the country’s royal family.
Many in Europe’s palaces would probably have been happy to confine themselves to various televised set-piece engagements and the occasional documentary, but by the 1980s the media, especially in Britain, wanted more. It was provided for them by Diana Spencer. For newspaper and magazine editors, not just in Britain but across the world, her arrival was a godsend. She was young and beautiful, and inclusion of her image on a cover was bound to boost circulation.
Diana’s Cinderella-like transformation from ordinary young woman about town to princess was something with which readers could identify – even if, as the daughter of an earl and a member of one of Britain’s grandest families, she had never been quite as “ordinary” as the media liked to portray her.
The protracted – and very public – collapse of her marriage to Charles during the 1990s provided even more stories, many of them fed to the press by the couple themselves. The tradition in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, had hitherto been that royal brides – however unhappy with their partners – kept their feelings to themselves. Diana was not ready to abide by that rule, however, and chose instead to follow the example of Caroline of Brunswick. The results were equally disastrous: Diana’s secret cooperation with Andrew Morton, which in 1992 produced Diana: Her True Story, chronicling the misery of her marriage – suicide attempts and all – prompted Charles to tell his version of events in an authorized book and television interview with the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby two years later. This, in turn, led Diana to retaliate in November 1995 with her notorious Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, in which she memorably declared: “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” As if that were not enough, even one of Diana’s lovers, James Hewitt, a dashing staff captain in the Life Guards, weighed in with Princess in Love, a steamy account of his relationship with the Princess wr
itten, according to many, in a style reminiscent of Barbara Cartland. The revelations proved great box office: some twenty-one million Britons – almost half the adult population – tuned in to watch Diana pour out her heart to Bashir – but, taken together, they constituted an unedifying spectacle that dealt a serious blow to the image of the British monarchy.
Diana’s death in August 1997, appropriately enough while being pursued by the paparazzi, heralded the third and final act in the tragedy – and generated even more press coverage. The fatal car accident in a tunnel in Paris and the various conspiracy theories that followed were the source of a flood of stories that continued for years.
Diana proved a difficult act to follow – especially for the British media. Princes William and Harry made good copy, although their respective girlfriends, Kate Middleton and Chelsy Davy, could not initially fill the gap left by the demise of the princes’ mother. Kate has necessarily moved to centre stage since her engagement and marriage. Yet both the national mood and attitude of the media have changed in the intervening years, and there has been no return to the reporting frenzy that accompanied Diana’s every move. William, understandably enough, has grown up with a strong suspicion towards the media, and has resisted strongly any attempt to turn Kate into a twenty-first-century version of his mother.
For her part, the Duchess has quickly demonstrated a flair for handling the media, dealing well with the relentless attention – and pressure. Her first speech, delivered on 19th March 2012 at the opening of a hospice in Ipswich, run by one of “her charities”, was roundly pronounced a success.
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