Television
Over-exposed
Richard Ingrams
One consequence of the Royal Wedding this week will, with any luck, be a slight let-up in the amount of television publicity given to the happy couple and in particular the poor over-exposed Prince of Wales. Since the engagement was announced in February hardly a news bulletin has gone by on ITN or BBC without some mention of his activities which are at best of marginal significance. The monarchy cannot survive with too much coverage and the closer the cameras get to it the flimsier it all begins to look. There was another BBC profile of Prince Charles on Sunday, a sort of telly equivalent of the souvenir brochure with the usual scenes of trooping the colour and helicopters being skilfully piloted about. Lady Longford informed us that the Prince learned smiles and jokes from his grandmother, and 'royal biographer' Anthony Holden told a well-rehearsed anecdote or two from his copious store. I myself cannot see the Prince and hear his curious strained voice emerging from behind clenched teeth without detecting the baneful influence of that disastrous old popinjay the late Lord Mountbatten. Although the film was entitled 'A Prince for Our Time' it left one with the impression that, after all the intensive training of Gordonstoun and Timbertop and the helicopter flights hither and thither, the Prince at the end of it looked like a man in desperate need of something to do while hanging around waiting to become King.
The happy couple appeared on both channels on the eve of their wedding, sitting in deck chairs in a summer house at Buckingham Palace and answering a series of fairly fatuous questions put by Andrew Gardner of ITN and Angela Rippon for the BBC. Some of the questions would have stopped experienced politicians in their tracks, let alone a nervous 20-year-old girl — 'After the marriage, how do you see your role developing, Lady Diana?' (Gardner) But Hawkfeatures's comments were if anything even more inapposite, e.g. 'It must have been enormous fun putting together a guest list', when in fact it was obviously a major nightmare, quite apart from the Barbara Cartland problem. It emerged that Prince Charles had planned the thing more as a sort of glorified promenade concert than a service of solemn matrimony. He only became animated during his 15-minute ordeal when he spoke of the musical arrangements that he had made with the help of his old mate Sir David Willcocks. I am writing before the ceremony so am in no position to comment on the result. I only hope the BBC commentators did better than that old fool Dorian Williams who made the most awful hash of the Royal Fireworks, describing Mark Phillips as Princess Mark Phillips and referring throughout to the torchbearers as `skites', when it turned out he meant 'scouts'.
Earlier this year I was asked by the Daily Telegraph's editor Bill Deedes to review a book about Jack Russell terriers by Brian Plummer. (Mr Deedes and I have a mutual interest in these dogs which I need not elaborate on this occasion.) I was reminded of the book by the appearance on BBC 2 on Sunday of Mr Plummer himself, a more genial figure than his writing might suggest. He is a Welshman, now living in the Midlands, who tried for a time to live off the land with the help of a pair of lurchers, but Who now earns a living teaching at a state school near Birmingham. Mr Plummer is a hunter but as he pointed out in his book the Opportunities for hunting are diminishing all the time because of the vanishing countryside and all the restrictions introduced by Parliament. The only real fun to be had with a pack of Jack Russells is to take them down to the chicken house, block up all the escape routes with straw, and let them loose on the rats. There were some exciting scenes on Sunday showing the little dogs killing 87 rats at a go. I'm sorry to say that my own Jack Russell, who normally enjoys watching the telly, missed it.
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