On a drizzly June day in 1953, Elizabeth, the young princess who had, the year before, become Queen, arrived on the world’s television screens. Her coronation was a landmark for small screen audiences – only the second world event to receive an international broadcast – and, apocryphally, precipitated a vast increase in the number of television sets in Britain. We became, almost overnight, a nation of square-eyed, goggle-box obsessives. And that was all thanks to Her late Majesty. Now, on a drizzly May day in 2023, it fell to her son, Charles III, to shake his tail feather in front of a world with a more entitled sense of access to splendour.
While Elizabeth II’s trip to Westminster Abbey was broadcast solely via the BBC (ITV, after all, didn’t come into existence until 1955), today’s ceremony aired across terrestrial channels (with only Channel 4 demurring and showing Johnny English Strikes Again instead) and via international broadcasters from CBS in the United States to Das Erste in Germany. Like the Queen’s funeral last year, the pageantry was unavoidable.
