Stop all the clocks,” WH Auden famously wrote of the enormity of grief, “cut off the telephone... Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.” If Auden were writing that poem about the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, the clocks might be replaced with “traffic” and the telephone with “central London”. For one day, Britain seems to have ground to a halt.
In a television landscape increasingly dominated by on-demand streaming, where live “event TV” has become limited to the Euros finals and Love Island, today we bore witness to the passing of a seminal moment in our island’s story: all the major channels devoted their scheduling to the Queen’s funeral, in a sombre, striking acknowledgement that an era is ending. And in this wall-to-wall broadcast, the protagonists – the new King Charles, his wife Camilla, sons William and Harry, and their wives, Kate and Meghan – moved with the enforced dispassion of performers. This was grief meeting history, with the eyes of the world quite literally upon them.
