But then, as I stand there—holding the 1,500-piece Diamond Jubilee box in my hand, featuring over thirty different pictures of the Queen, from all decades of her reign—I realize that Mr. Puzzles Jigsaw World is a place that sees a great many specific requests. At the counter, a man, accompanied by his daughter, says, “You’ve got a llama one here—but would you happen to have any alpaca? She can tell the difference.”
In the hardware store down the road, the Union Jack toilet paper—displayed in the window—has been a runaway bestseller, at £4.20.
“How have you analyzed that?” I ask the woman behind the counter. “Is it an act of fervent monarchist patriotism, to buy Union Jack toilet paper? Or is it just republicans, wiping their bums on the national flag?”
“I don’t know,” she admits. “But our Reverend Charles has told us we mustn’t refer to it as ‘toilet paper’—but ‘bunting for bums.’”
This is Jubilee toilet paper that has been mentioned in a church sermon. God has had to intervene. That’s how confused we all are.
Back outside, the side streets are empty. The road is shiny black. Buses pass in waves of splash and surf. I take my iPhone out, to write down a poignant thought about the Queen, and three super-fat raindrops hit the screen so hard that they type the word “trr.” The weather is beginning to give the impression of sentience. No one will be out celebrating the Jubilee in this filth. Already slightly anxious, I suddenly am struck by a terrible thought.
“Oh God,” I think, in sudden panic. “Is it in my heart? Is the answer to my quest—to find the Jubilee, out here—that it is actually ‘in my heart’? Oh God, please don’t let the Jubilee be in my heart.”
Ten minutes later, and I realize what an idiot I’ve been. Of course the Jubilee isn’t in my heart. That would be ridiculous. The Jubilee is on the telly—where all the best things are.
One thirty p.m., and the BBC’s coverage of the Royal Flotilla begins. The BBC have already put an astonishing amount of spadework into the Jubilee. On Friday night I watched Jennie Bond’s tribute, which had taken the frankly left-field editorial decision to tell the story of the Queen’s sixty-year reign—but solely and only through all her visits to the southwest of England.
Stock footage of the sixties showed Britain’s cultural explosion: the country taking acid and landing in Oz—Technicolor and magnificent in floral minis, floral Minis, and John Lennon’s kaleidoscope eyes.
“But things were different down in the south of the country!” Bond’s voice-over said, cheerfully.
A lovely auld fella in a cap appeared. “What us lot were looking forward to,” he said in an intense Cornish burr, “were the Royal Yacht Britannia coming into the harbor at Plymouth. Boy oh boy—what a boat!”
The 1970s, meanwhile, were heralded by the fabulous, drawling decline of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”—“No / Future! / No / Future!”—accompanied by some footage of the Queen cutting into an enormous piece of cheese, with a sword. I presume she was in Wookey Hole.
The nineties were my favorite decade, however. Over pictures of the troubled marriages of Prince Charles and Prince Andrew, Windsor Castle on fire, and Diana’s funeral, Bond’s voice-over chirped, “This was the start of a time of turmoil for the Royal Family. And it was also my start in my tenure as the BBC’s royal correspondent!”
Because that’s how we all remember it. Bond time.
Back on the Thames, on Sunday, and the BBC’s coverage of the Flotilla was off to a worrying start. Settling down on the sofa with a yard of cake—lemon sponge! God bless you, ma’am!—and consulting the Radio Times, it became apparent to me, with increasing panic, that there were no Dimblebys involved in the forthcoming coverage. This was the harbinger of a terrible and dark shadow—darker even than the clouds above Tower Bridge.
I looked down the list of broadcasters the BBC had lined up: Anneka Rice, Sandi Toksvig, Fearne Cotton, Matt Baker, and Sophie Raworth. All perfectly fine in their place, on their day—but here? In a five-hour-long live broadcast that was going to consist—it was rapidly becoming apparent—of one thousand largely nondescript boats passing very slowly past the Wagamama on the South Bank? This was sending boys in to do a man’s job. Lambs to the slaughter. Osborne as chancellor. You just have to throw a Dimbleby at this stuff. It’s standard.
Almost the first utterance by the BBC’s commentator—Paul Dickenson—augured ill. Getting our first shots of the Spirit of Chartwell—the “floating palace” built specifically for the occasion—Dickenson seemed overcome with awe.
“Look at the gilding on the stern of that boat!” he said, excitedly. “Absolutely beautiful!”
On Sky, meanwhile, the perpetually saturnine Eamonn Holmes had a slightly different view.
“It looks rather like a floating Chinese restaurant,” he said, dourly.
On Twitter, the boat did not find favor with footballing maverick Joey Barton. “Dear Imperialist Nations—stop robbing the world’s poor of their resources and start examining the fabric of your rotting societies,” he Tweeted. Barton sounded like a man who had absolutely no cake in his house.
Diminutive magician Paul Daniels saw it very differently, however.
“LONG LIVE OUR AMAZING QUEEN!” he Tweeted—giving the impression of someone currently weeping Eccles cakes and tiny Battenberg squares while covered, loyally, in hundreds of first-class stamps.
Before the Jubilee, when I considered what my potential memories of the Flotilla might be, I had imagined a mélange of scarlet and gold, billowing sails, leaping dolphins, and foaming, crested waves. Hundreds of eccentric boats teasing their way past Parliament—in some kind of nautical cross between Wacky Races and Dunkirk, but in a good way.
In the event, this was not what the Royal Flotilla was like.
Just twenty-four hours later, my memories of it seemed oddly misty. To all intents and purposes, it didn’t really happen. There was no “there” there. For five hours, the television broadcast a sky as gray and cold as the river, with the odd boat slicing, diminutively, left to right, through the center—like a missed ball in Pong. We were just watching live footage of clouds sitting on London—eating the Shard, soaking Tower Bridge.
Aurally, things were just as scopey. Mics failed; choirs were blown away. Boat horns blared, endlessly, in a mournful loop—even as the commentators trailed away into silence. The impression was of some pale gray fever dream where you phased in and out of consciousness, but with your mouth full of lemon drizzle cake. For four hours, the BBC essentially spent millions of pounds broadcasting the inside of a cloud.
Whenever something did happen, however, it was often so surreal that you longed for a return to the mist. Everyone’s idea of what “interesting” or “spectacular” consisted of appeared to come from a different age: definitely one before the Internet, CGI, Ecstasy, or rock ’n’ roll, and possibly before universal suffrage.
The Spirit of Chartwell sailed past the Sea Containers building, which had been covered with a massive 100-by-70-meter black-and-white photograph of the Royal Family on the balcony at Buckingham Palace during the Silver Jubilee.
“I hope that was a nice surprise for the Queen’s party!” Dickenson said.
I’m sure it was—it depicted Princess Anne standing next to her ex-husband. Awkward.
“It’s the largest photo ever of the Royal Family,” Dickenson said, firmly—like a man convinced people at home might be going, “Balls! I once saw a much bigger picture of Princess Michael, at Hampton Court Palace!”
We then cut to an extreme close-up of Countryfile presenter Ben Fogle, who was in the midst of the Flotilla, energetically rowing in a tiny skiff, alongside Blue Peter presenter Helen Skelton. However, it was a bad time to come to Fogle as he was, at that very second, passing the Royal Boat, and had important work to do.
“Three cheers for Her Majesty!” Fogle yelled, dementedly, mic distorting, going all the way to eleven with his poshness, and thrusting his oar into the sky. “Hip hip�
��HOORAY! Hip hip—HOORAY!”
The camera waited for him to start presenting—but he simply shouted “HOORAY!” again, while beaming at Her Majesty. His priorities were clear: loyalty to Her Majesty first, broadcasting for the BBC a poor second.
Things were equally odd over on “the world’s biggest floating belfry,” where the living embodiment of “jazz hands,” John Barrowman, had committed to spending the next three hours “ringing a peal with Dickon Love and his guys.”
Observing Barrowman in the rather brutal-looking vessel—it was simply a massive floating box, with eight gigantic bells in it—he did look rather like someone willingly walking into a massive floating torture chamber.
“This is what it is to be British!” he shouted in his American accent.
Over on the Millennium Bridge, Anneka Rice was presenting a lighthearted strand—artists painting their views of the big day. However, the rain was so pounding that some of the paintings had literally dissolved. One artist—in desperation—had covered his picture with a cloth, to preserve it.
“Show us what you’ve done!” Rice urged.
As he removed the cloth, we realized it had got stuck to the canvas with rain—and the whole painting, in perfect reverse, was now printed to its underside, having lifted off completely. He held the sodden, flapping, paint-stained cloth to camera. By now, the wind was so high that the bunting was making desperate “dapdapdapdap” sounds.
“I love it!” Rice shouted, over the noise. “It’s so . . . Monet! It would be easier without the rain, to be honest—but we soldier on!”
John Sergeant simply didn’t care. Positioned on Westminster Bridge, he looked like a man who’d spent the last hour on the phone to his agent, shouting, “Balls to this, Paul! There’s shit-all going on down here, and I’ve just spent twenty minutes padding with Richard E. Grant about whether he’s wearing Union Jack underpants or not. You can whistle for your commission on this pile of fuck.”
Having only been thrown to twice in four hours, Sergeant’s last link was an act of profound nihilism, delivered with parodic Light Entertainment cheerfulness.
“I have to say, we’ll probably see more of the day’s events when we get home, on the television!” he said, with hateful brightness. “We’ve all been cheering the pictures on the big TV screens down here. Literally any excuse to cheer! Come on!”
He addressed the gathered, sodden crowd with a wild eye.
“Come on!” he repeated. “Hurrah! Hurrah! It’s just a simple, straightforward celebration! HURRAH!”
Back in the studio, there was a similar, terrible faux brightness. The One Show’s Matt Baker seemed particularly, sparklingly supercilious. He had the same air that he did when he asked David Cameron, disingenuously, “How do you sleep at night?”
Every time he said “It’s an astonishing day” to one of his guests, his eye telegraphed that he was finishing the sentence in his head with “. . . if you’re simple.”
At one point, he looked straight down the barrel of the camera with a fixed grin, and asked us, directly, “What do you think of the event so far?”
The Spirit of Chartwell passed a group of people doing semaphore.
“It’s not just people waving flags!” Baker said, as if addressing a child. “It all means something to the people who understand it. I should think it probably means something to the Duke of Edinburgh.”
However, the distress of Baker, Sergeant, Rice, et al., was nothing compared to the BBC’s main guy that day—the unseen Paul Dickenson, taking the Dimbleby Chair, and commentating over this scene of hypothermiating, rain-lashed pageantry.
Over the course of four hours in which—to borrow Spike Milligan’s description of the Second World War, “Nothing happened! But it happened suddenly”—Dickenson slowly fell prey to Partridge Fever: that unfortunate state of affairs whereby a broadcaster has to pad for so long, with so little, that they lose all sense of normal human perspective and humor, and start sounding like Alan Partridge.
The Spirit of Chartwell was not just the royal boat—but “a precious boat, with a precious cargo.”
A shot of twenty rowboats was “certainly a Canaletto moment—all powered by the human shoulders, back, arms, and legs.”
Another boat passed by. “I’ve got a feeling that, in that boat, are some survivors of cancer,” Dickenson said, without any further qualification.
After a while, Dickenson gave the impression that he’d actually stopped looking at the footage that was coming in. A fire rescue boat sped by—firing its water cannons at the crowd. Onboard, the firemen—being firemen—had positioned the cannons at pelvis height, for maximum lolz.
“A fire rescue boat there, celebrating in its own, special way,” Dickenson said, unheeding. Minutes later, he was summing up the day as “one of those occasions where you really have to be there to soak up the atmosphere. It really is electric.”
This over footage of a small child with its head slumped on some railings, in the rain.
My favorite moment, however, came when Tower Bridge opened up to let the Flotilla through: “An extraordinary machine, lifting an extraordinary road into the sky,” Dickenson said—unconscious that the rest of the country ended this sentence for him with a hearty “Ah-HA!”
For indeed, on Twitter, the coverage was not going down well. Stephen Fry spoke for the nation when he Tweeted, “This is mind-numbingly tedious. I just expected better of the BBC.”
Anyone who knew their Twitter history would not have been surprised when, minutes later, diminutive magician Paul Daniels Tweeted a furious reply. Daniels and Fry have been locked in mortal enmity since last year’s Royal Wedding, when Fry started Tweeting about a darts match being broadcast concurrently.
“WHO CARES?????” Daniels had Tweeted him, furiously, before forming an unlikely online alliance with eighties puppet Roland Rat (“I can’t believe this guy is so cynical! Off with his head!”).
When it came, now, to the Jubilee, Daniels clearly wanted to head Fry’s rampant republicanism off early.
“It’s a bloody sight better than football, darts, snooker . . .” Daniels told Fry, firmly.
And in this, Daniels had an ally in Dickenson.
“They say the Queen’s seen everything before—but she won’t have seen something like this!” he claimed as nine people in anoraks sailed a barge past her.
And, indeed, the world had not seen anything like it before. And the world was confused. On that night’s Daily Show, America’s voice of sexy liberal reason, Jon Stewart, watched footage of the Flotilla—the Queen, unsmiling, in the downpour, staring at a succession of barges and tugs—with increasing confusion and astonishment.
“Is this the British equivalent of a monster truck show?” he asked, eventually.
“No, Jon Stewart,” you wanted to say. “This is our Jubilee. This is what we do.” Somehow, being British is all tied up in ruined watercolors, and floating belfries, and the sight of a BBC cameraman having to clean his rain-splashed lens off with a tissue with a quiet “squick squick squick squick” sound. This is how we roll.
Have some cake. It helps.
Monday, and the Jubilee Concert. While there may have been national doubt about the meaning, and effectiveness, of the Flotilla, there were no such doubts about the concert. Putting on a themed concert, full of megastars playing no more than three songs each, is one of our great national talents—along with producing flamboyant homosexuals and great cheeses. We invented Live Aid! How difficult could this be?
Where Live Aid was organized by Bob Geldof, with the intention of aiding the starving, the Jubilee Concert was organized by Gary Barlow, with the intention of making Her Majesty tap her foot a little. And if—as a consequence of this concert going magnificently—Barlow should seem like a right and fitting person to subsequently get a MASSIVE knighthood, would that be such a bad thing? Would it? Does “Sir Gary Barlow” seem like such an unlikely invention? Does it?
After all, it wasn’t just the conce
rt Barlow had put on for Her Majesty. For currently at number one is the song Barlow wrote for the Jubilee, “Sing,” which was accompanied by an hour-long BBC documentary on Barlow’s “mission” to include subjects from across the Commonwealth in its making: the African Children’s Choir, Slum Drummers from Kenya, Jamaica’s Jolly Boys, and Aboriginal guitarist Gurrumul, all contributing a rich global heritage to make “Sing” sound exactly like a classic midpaced Gary Barlow number.
The main difference between Live Aid and the Jubilee Concert was that, while Live Aid began with Status Quo and “Rockin’ All Over the World,” the Jubilee Concert began with a statement from Huw Edwards about the Duke of Edinburgh’s bladder infection: “So, sadly, he will not be joining the Queen tonight,” Edwards said, solemnly, in the very antithesis of screaming, “LONDON! ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?”
Over the next three hours, it became quietly apparent that, when it comes down to it, pop music is just better than some boats. Barlow gave the cake-eating audience what it wanted—Robbie Williams doing “Let Me Entertain You,” Sir Elton John doing “Crocodile Rock”—but, also, what it didn’t know it wanted, most notably with Grace Jones, stalking onto the stage in what appeared to be Intergalactic Sex Armor, and hula-hooping, imperiously, throughout “Slave to the Rhythm.”
There was a slightly awkward moment when Annie Lennox appeared onstage, blond, and wearing a pair of wings, and the actor Rufus Jones Tweeted “DIANA!!!!!”—but in all—as has so often happened—Britain’s ability to knock out great pop stars covered up for its awkward inability to know what to do with its heritage anymore without seeming slightly embarrassed.
At the end of the performance—after Madness turning Buckingham Palace into a terraced street for “Our House,” and McCartney’s “Live and Let Die”—the Queen came onstage, escorted by Barlow.
Gary had his most solemn “I’m with the Queen” face on. He looked so knightable. He looked like he’d momentarily considered pretending to drop a pound and kneeling to pick it up—just to give her the idea.
As the Queen gave a small wave, to thank everyone for coming, Twitter was still churning away at an incident that had happened earlier in the evening. Joining Stevie Wonder onstage, will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas had shouted, “Happy birthday, Your Highness!,” before launching into Wonder’s “Happy Birthday.”
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