Television
If you want to watch that wedding, you’ll be spoiled for choice, but it will be a late night.
What the world needs now is love, if the level of interest in the royal wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is anything to go by.
It’s the same day as the FA Cup Final, but the UK has gone gaga. Thousands are expected to descend on Windsor, and it is reported that hundreds of street parties are planned.
“There is such an intense interest,” says journalist Lucy Hockings (above right), who is part of a team covering the wedding for the BBC World News. “We know from Kate and Wills’ wedding, which was watched by millions and millions of people around the world, how big royal weddings are.”
The channel has plans for three days of coverage from Windsor Castle before the wedding. It will then hand over to the BBC’s domestic UK coverage.
Hockings, a New Zealander, has been with BBC World News for 19 years. She’s covered 9/11, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the 2005 London bombings and the 2004 “Boxing Day” tsunami. A wedding, you might think, pales in comparison, but no.
“It’s really lovely to be thinking and talking about something happy,” she says. “It’s a bit of a respite from the relentlessness of the news agenda. I think that’s one of the reasons people are looking forward to it so much. Even the third little [royal] baby that’s just been born, people talked about it a lot here, because it just felt like it was needed.”
People like Harry, says Hockings, and the British public in general approve of American actress Meghan Markle. “There’s a really simple reason: Harry seems really happy. When you see them together, he is quite besotted with her. You can see that he loves her, so people are happy that he’s happy.”
The coverage of the wedding
starts on BBC World News (Sky 089) at 9.00pm on Saturday. Not to be outdone, TVNZ 1’s coverage begins at 9.05pm, preceded by An Invitation to a Royal Wedding, an hour-long special presented by Trevor McDonald and Julie Etchingham. Over on Three, Melissa Davies, Lisa Owen and Lloyd Burr are in Windsor for the six-hour-long Newshub Royal Wedding Special, which begins at 7.00pm. For a slightly more irreverent American angle, Prime is screening The Royal Wedding Live with Cord and Tish on Sunday at 9.30pm, in which comedians Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon play faux news anchors Cord Horsenback and Tish Cattigan.