Off heir! Why it’s time to ban royal weddings from TV
If you woke up with a surfeit of sympathy today, you might spare a thought for Princess Beatrice and her betrothed, Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi. The BBC has declined the right to televise their wedding – and ITV has turned it down, too, all the more bitter a pill since Princess Eugenie had hers televised in 2018. When you get to that bit of the royal family where primogeniture is about as much bloody use to you as a tiara made of mice, the least you can expect is the same amount of telly as your younger sister. It is most probably related to the disgrace of Prince Andrew, which is not Beatrice’s fault.
I should like to cheer up the heiress-to-shame by pointing out that royal weddings should never have been televised in the first place.
Many of us sit down willingly in front of these events, despite not being in any way committed to the royal family or, for that matter, the institution of marriage. For Charles and Diana, this was because there was nothing else on; for William and Kate, it was because you could start drinking mid-morning (this made Eugenie’s a complicated affair: she is simply not a significant enough figure that you could toast her with Prosecco at 10am on a Friday without admitting you had a problem. This accounts for the comparatively low viewing figures – 3.9 million – a million of whom would have been watching This Morning anyway. Really, you have to get close to 20 million or go home).
Even drunk, however, you couldn’t miss the fact that very little happens in a wedding. Even when something genuinely interesting does occur – Meghan and Harry’s leftish choice of sermon and leftfield-ish music – it is something to discuss later, rather than a thing to watch. If weddings were at all engaging, we would all go to church. Being creatures of narrative, we have to find fascination in the detail: dirty looks, upstaging, tears, all the usual dramas attendant upon a family affair. Since this is a very buttoned-up family, everything becomes overinterpreted to the nth degree. Attention is forced upon whose bottom looks good, a story that will then run for months, which has a sullying effect on the entire culture.
In 2005, my mother had a heart attack in Reykjavík, and so it came to pass that, for the blessing service of Charles and Camilla’s civil ceremony, the Icelandic health service wheeled a TV up to her bed, and we all had to watch it to be polite. All the nurses stopped to watch it because they thought we were so excited. That absurd confection – artifice piled upon artifice, in respect of other people’s fake feelings for a couple of very long standing in late middle age – was as moving and human as any royal wedding TV event I have ever witnessed. So Beatrice should be relieved, I think – although that is easy for a commoner to say.
