The British royal family have always been quick to take advantage of advances in media technology to communicate with the public and to maintain their visibility and popularity. Buckingham Palace actively constructs royal media coverage and image-marketing, employing professional press secretaries and publicity agents, generating press releases and photo opportunities and producing official websites. The royal family has Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, and YouTube and TikTok Channels. Royal events are now designed explicitly to provide a spectacle for media consumption. Despite initial worries that too much publicity might impinge on the mystique or dignity of royalty, the necessity of modern technology and media coverage in keeping the royal family relevant and facilitating a sense of national community was soon readily accepted.
The BBC has been a constant partner in this endeavour. The Corporation’s first Director General, Lord Reith, was an enthusiast for both the monarchy and the ritual that attended it, and from the Duke of York’s 1923 wedding onwards, live radio broadcasts, ‘audible pageants’, became a fixture of the national schedule. Their atmosphere was conveyed by strategically placed microphones that picked up sounds of horses and carriages and cheering crowds. Broadcasting also helped ‘domesticate’ and ‘democratise’ monarchy; it brought the institution into people’s homes, assisting its 20th century rebranding as ‘the royal family’, and giving ordinary people, observes historian David Cannadine, ‘a sense of participation in ceremonial which had never been possible before’.
Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953 was the first media event to be seen by the majority of the British population, attracting over 20 million viewers, and was for many their first experience of ‘watching the box’. It is an event that has become a touchstone in the mythology of the nation and the memories of millions. It provided unprecedented access to the detail of the ceremony, with coverage from inside Westminster Abbey making the finer points of the pomp and circumstance visible to all viewers.
Since the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002, big screens in public places relaying live broadcasts to large crowds, often very near to the ‘real’ action, have become an increasingly important and visible element of royal celebrations. My own research on the experiences of people watching royal events in this way found that sharing the occasion with others was important to them. Interviewees said that they ‘wanted to be around people to experience the sense of community and shared excitement’, and that they were motivated by the opportunity to be part of history, to experience a ‘once-in-a-lifetime event’, to ‘feel the atmosphere and be able to say, “I was there!”’.
Apparently paradoxically, as broadcast technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, the ‘ancient’ and ‘traditional’ elements of ceremonial retain their importance. Although King Charles has reportedly affirmed that his Coronation should reflect his vision for ‘a smaller, more modern monarchy’, and will indeed be smaller in size and shorter in length than his mother’s, perhaps acknowledging the attenuated attention spans of the digital age, in many ways it will be a continuation. In Westminster Abbey, the setting for British Coronations for 900 years, King Charles III will take the Coronation oath, be anointed with consecrated oil, receive the orb and sceptres, and be crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Audiences on all media platforms would no doubt be profoundly disappointed if it were otherwise.
In our contemporary world, media combine and cross-reference, creating novel forms of narrative, new types of public ‘space’ and new relationships between them. Rapid response media platforms no longer merely represent events, but become part of them. In contrast to the ‘top down’, unidirectional, nature of conventional broadcasting, social media provides opportunities for audience feedback, for dialogue and discussion between viewers. Although this can be a means to generate virtual community spirit, there is scope too for more mischievous and dissenting responses. Not all of the ‘netizens’ posting on Twitter during the Queen’s funeral were deferential subjects. Jokey memes about chess moves and a fascination with a spider on the coffin punctured the solemnity of the official narrative. More seriously, from the royal family’s point of view, the period after the Queen’s death saw a huge spike in the sharing of the hashtags #abolishthemonarchy and #notmyking. This is problematic for an institution that must embrace new media to remain prominent and relevant but must also find strategies to deal with its more challenging attributes.