Television
Wedding watch
Clive Gammon By midday, with no sign of a diversion, not even by a linemuffing bishop or a fainting trumpeter, the fantasies began to build up. A well-mounted attack on the Abbey, maybe, by a strong band of roving Comanches. "He's
dead. Marshal!" cries a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, dragging a still-quivering shaft from the bedizened breast of Prince Rainier of Monaco, "And they're dragging off the Mistress of the Robes." But what are those hoofbeats? The Blues and Royals, of course. making it just in time ...
Pretty juvenile, eh? Well, so was the Wedding of the Year. From a sense of duty and because I'd been brainwashed by the media, high and low, into thinking that I was being unduly curmudgeonly in writing the thing off as a boring piece of expensive flummery, I got up early to get the benefit of Fyfe Robertson, Valerie Singleton et al. giving out with news, views and entertainment from 7.07 am on.
Not that anyone dared mention, except in the briefest possible way,
the real news, the appalling
financial crisis in the nation's life that had become plain less than twenty-four hours previously. Not much of a morning if you happened to be a building worker, for instance, whose boss would be getting no more bank facilities for a while. For me the day sheered sharply away from reality when Michele Brown, mingling with the somewhat thin crowd outside
Buckingham Palace, explained that "unfortunately, some people are still working this morning." Those are my italics but her sense of values.
New Zealanders, cockneys and the Guardian (whose post-wed ding cross-head went "Moving, erotic, glorious — the Anne and Mark show") seem to be the
front-runners among, royalty-fan
ciers. I felt sorry for the New York Times man, gushingly interviewed
about the powerful impact the wedding telecast was sure to have on the American public, who was clearly torn between the desire to speak the truth and the wish not to offend. Over there in Boseman, Montana, Ketchum, Idaho and Las Crusces, New Mexico, were they re-scheduling their breakfast buckwheat cakes not to miss the Bishop of Maidstone reading Ephesians 6 v 10-18? You betcha.
"The British have no peers in pomp," said the NYT man diplomatically.
Cooler to Miss Singleton was the bride they'd discovered in the Midlands whose wedding day it also was. No, she wasn't sorry she'd chosen this particular day, she said. No, she didn't mind missing the other wedding. She seemed to be wondering if Miss Singleton was all there.
The pace of the fatuities increased. "Princess Anne, as you know," said Alastair Burnet, "is a Leo."; "The whole of national life is here," said someone else; "They look just like wedding guests," said Janey Ironside, the BBC's.. fashion commentator, indicating' the wedding guests. For once, the • Morning Star had things dead to rights. 'It's more like a bloody funeral,' it headlined. Precisely as the BBC told us that foreign viewers were now joining the transmission, the howl of an ambulance siren cut in with fitting symbolism.
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