Your Majesty,” said the Prince of Wales, beginning his speech of thanks after the Jubilee concert. “Your Majesty — Mummy.” The crowd laughed happily. Mummy’s lips twitched. She looked almost Punjabi in her heavily embroidered gold dress.
It wasn’t much, but it was the best moment of the entire hours-long concert, held this Monday in honour of the British Queen’s 60 years on the throne. The music and showmanship on stage were, no surprise, dull. How can a plebeian superstar (be he ever so nobly aged and knighted) sing his plebeian superhits with the necessary fire when he has the Royal Box facing him, Buckingham Palace looming behind, and a winged memorial to Queen Victoria overhead?
The poor BBC, the UK’s national broadcaster and respected the world over for its news coverage, struggled and failed to make the most of this feature story. Its viewers were shown mostly close-ups of the elderly stars’ faces as they performed, and occasional distant shots of the Palace with lights thrown on its facade, and wide crowd shots, and – not nearly often enough – a fleeting look at the senior royals in their box. We hardly ever saw the Royal Mum, even though it was her Jubilee concert. Presumably she was grimacing.
The same peculiar celebrity fixation had spoiled the coverage of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant the day before. Who wants to see unrecognisable British celebrities discuss their Jubilee lunches behind a pile of Jubilee tat — while, that is, a thousand boats of all sizes and histories sail down the Thames? Show me the boats! Please show me the boats!
When the BBC did show us the boats, from time to time and in between extraordinarily speedy interviews with street artists and wrinkly military veterans (“Oh, it’s amazing. Absolutely incredible. Such an occasion. Such an honour.” Or was that the bystanders?), they did so from a tremendous distance. In the wet London weather, on the choppy Thames, from half a kilometre away and high up, the colourful little boats with their brightly dressed (but wet and cold) crews looked like little grey smudges.
Now, there is a tradition in such things. (And I don’t mean the tradition marked by the brilliant TV historian Simon Schama, who said, “It was so British. We were all saying, well, it would have been such a terrible disappointment had the sun come out.”) This is a royal occasion, based on the festivities of Renaissance monarchs, the Thames is the river that winds through the heart of the realm, the banks are lined with loyal subjects waving flags, representatives are here (on and off the river) from former subject territories on every continent — there is an accepted way of recording such an event. This way is the old-fashioned way: think of court portraiture with its delight in sumptuous detail, the sheen of velvet, the droop of fine lace, the glint of gold, the appropriate relative size of subjects of varying importance...
What is monarchy without all this?
And what is the use of a state broadcaster of glorious pedigree that cannot rise to this occasion? Even Doordarshan does better: on Republic Day, watch DD and you will not miss a single float on Rajpath. The coverage will not be interrupted for lengthy asides with, say, Sonam Kapoor. What’s more, you will be able to study, closely, the (lamentable) design details of every float.
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The one Renaissance painter the BBC ought to have paid close attention to is Canaletto, the 18th-century Venetian master who painted big scenes in astonishing, but not overpowering, detail. The relevant works were conveniently to hand — in the Queen’s own art collection. Look at Regatta on the Grand Canal, for instance, in which the artist chose to site his viewing eye perhaps a dozen feet above the canal. So he got close-ups of the highly decorated boats and rowers in the foreground as well as a long view far down the Canal, past scores of other lavish boats and cheerily festooned palazzi on either side.
What could the BBC have learned? Well, what altitude to hang their cameras at, for one. That is, not off a helicopter, and not on a bobbing boat. And certainly nowhere near a verbally frantic reporter. I’m looking right now at a number of canal scenes by Canaletto, all in British collections, and he seems to have chosen more or less the same altitude every time. Canaletto must have done hundreds of sketches — did the BBC not do a single dry run?
Perhaps all the annoyed comment shook the BBC, because for the final day of the Jubilee, which included the massive set-piece of the service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral, it cut out the faff. As if embarrassed, the cameras kept looking away — and as a result we viewers saw a lot of architecture, and too much altogether of the brass chandeliers.