How the Coronation ushered in the age of the home video
With Britain luxuriating in a warm bath of post-royal wedding pomp, The Queen’s Coronation in
Colour (ITV) came at a good time. It was perhaps a little odd that they didn’t broadcast it on Saturday, which would have been the actual 65th anniversary of the Queen’s Coronation, but then ITV had international football and the British Soap Awards on then, so something had to give.
Scheduling apart, Alexander Armstrong’s cheery perusal of an event that brought the Queen, via the newly popular medium of television, closer to her subjects than ever before, was a visual feast. It wasn’t just the much-celebrated film of the pageantry itself, mesmerising though that remains: it was grainy archive footage of Coronation celebrations across the country, combined with the thoughts and memories of those who were there.
Armstrong certainly wasn’t the first to note that the Coronation ushered in the age of mass television in Britain, but he did add, perceptively I thought, that the Queen’s fascination with videography had also led to a run on cine cameras in 1953 – people were watching more than ever before, but
they were also filming more. Now, 65 years later, we’re at a stage where everyone’s so busy filming things that they barely have time to watch them.
The surge in home video at that time meant that The Queen’s
Coronation in Colour had a wealth of amateur footage to choose from, and intercut with the regalia it made for some subtle social history. I wasn’t quite sure what having a celebrity presenter brought to proceedings, but then I rarely am. But if you have to have someone wandering around Westminster Abbey looking wistful then better Armstrong than a gurning perma-tan from Made in Chelsea. His time hosting Pointless has at least given him the popular touch. When he took the footage of a Coronation party in Aberfan, the Welsh mining village which, 13 years later, would be the scene of a devastating colliery disaster, and laid on a screening for the current community, it was genuinely touching. None of them were filming it on their phones.
Lucy Worsley’s style of hist-orama is by now well known enough to be an open goal for parody. Essentially she gets to play dress-up and wear silly hats, while guiding us through history like a hyperactive primary
schoolteacher playing Little Bo Peep.
Her role-play can be irritating when you know something about the subject already – hence various spats across the years with self-styled “serious” historians who think that things like washing Tudor linen in urine to prove a point is daft. But when it came to the suffragettes, a subject about which I knew no more than the railingchaining and horse-trampling that I imagine is most people’s two-liner, Suffragettes with Lucy Worsley
(BBC One) brought history to life.
The 90 minutes ran like a long re-enactment: actors played the Pankhursts as well as the lesser known (yet equally as fascinating) members of the group, reading out letters directly to the camera and then staging the key moments. It was played largely as a drama, in other words, with Worsley dressed up as an extra and hovering in the background until she eventually stepped forward, broke the fourth wall and dealt out a few historical nuggets to the viewer.
Her challenge was to bring something of the missionary verve, the excitement, frustration and urgency of the movement to life, given that now, only 100 years later, the idea of women not having the vote seems so prehistoric. Questions of what would motivate someone to get themselves put in prison, turn to violence and arson, or plant a bomb couldn’t be more relevant in this age of extremism – and Worsley didn’t hum and haw, calling the suffragettes “the most prolific home-grown terrorist organisation this country has ever seen”.
Given that the suffragettes’ motto was “Deeds not Words” it was apt that their deeds should be recalled through dramatisation. The programme built towards a satisfying narrative climax as it headed towards the Great War and the suffragettes’ actions increased in anger and daring.
It may have been a strange hybrid but 100 years on this programme gave the suffragettes the one thing they once lacked and the only thing they wanted – a voice.
The Queen’s Coronation in Colour ★★★★ Suffragettes with Lucy Worsley ★★★★