TV : Documentary : TV quality : English



The Queen's Coronation: Behind Palace Doors

Tuesday, 2nd December 2008
9pm to 10pm
Channel4


The BBC's televising of the Queen's coronation was the perfect media event, an all-day plug for the monarchy and television. The nation was thrilled by its new Queen and by its new gadget.

As Behind Palace Doors pointed out, of the 27 million viewers who watched, 10 million had never sat in front of a set before. Yet Sir Alan Lascelles, the Queen's private secretary, and Winston Churchill, her Prime Minister, were surely right to believe that no good to the monarchy would come of shedding the TV lights upon its magic. Once the cameras were let in, they would never leave. Sure enough, the Queen's reign began as the greatest show on earth and became a soap opera. It culminates here in this documentary that airs every last detail of a pettily divided ruling family.

The Queen, who had wanted to keep the crowds out of what she saw as a religious ceremony, had bowed before a campaign of leaks from the BBC and a poll in the Daily Express that found 78 per cent in favour of the cameras. It was just as well. The historian Piers Brendon observed that by 1953 the cult of monarchy resembled a British Shintuism. Naval ratings were ordered to refrain from alcohol or sexual intercourse for 48 hours before they lined the route to the abbey, "lest it contaminate the royal Juju".

But there was nothing magical behind the scenes: only artifice and squabbling. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, reluctant to move from Buckingham Palace into cramped little Clarence House, was literally frozen out by having her heating turned off. The Duke of Edinburgh, badly sidelined, begged that his adopted surname Mountbatten replace the family's equally artificial "Windsor" tag and was shot down. Prince Philip wanted his rackety pal Baron to do the pictures. The Queen Mum got in Beaton instead. And you thought organising a family Christmas was problematic...