The perfect warm-up for Jubilee TV was on the radio
What a wonderful weekend that was and radio certainly enhanced the pomp and the pleasure of it. To some extent, it was always going to a poor relation to its colourful TV cousin when covering the pageantry and other highly visual elements of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations. In the end, though, almost everything radio set out to do it did very well indeed.
There were some superb specialist documentaries, such as Archive on 4: Encounters with Elizabeth (Radio 4, Saturday) in which royal historian Robert Lacey raided the BBC archives for stories of what a nerve-shredding, gulp-inducing, yet always uplifting experience meeting the Queen has been for countless people over the 70 years of her reign. There was a palpable sense of timespan here – one clip movingly recalled a royal visit to a cholera-stricken Aberdeen in 1952 that sounded like it was from an entirely different age. And Lacey juggled stories of deep respect and love for the Queen with some terrific anecdotes. One in particular, involving an early arrival at an event and a fit of giggles at the sight of a group of surprised bishops dashing in full regalia to meet her car, brought out brilliantly the Queen’s sense of humour.
Edith Bowman took a more oblique but equally celebratory approach on Sunday with Playing the Queen (Radio 2) assembling a thumping roster of guests to share the joys (and, more often, terrors) of taking on the role of the most famous woman on Earth. Alongside the super-starry likes of Helen Mirren, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy, a particular gem was lookalike Jeannette Charles recalling a decades-long, globetrotting career based entirely on her resemblance to the Queen. Beyond the BBC, on Classic FM the station’s composer in residence Debbie Wiseman presented Music for Monarchy (Thursday and Friday), a particularly lovely two-parter looking back over the Queen’s life and reign through music that has been inspired by and written for her.
When it came to live coverage, the BBC undoubtedly let television take the strain, abandoning the field almost entirely to it for events such as Trooping the Colour and Sunday’s pageant on The Mall. What radio did cover, though, tended to be more focused and, refreshingly, a lot less celebrity-led than on television. (Much as we loved Kirsty Young’s amazing feat of anchoring for BBC One, there’s a limit to how much Lulu some of us can take.)
Thus, ahead of Friday’s Service of Thanksgiving for the Queen’s Reign, while the TV cameras spent hours capturing the “colour” of every Tom, Meghan and Harry swanning into St Paul’s, on Woman’s Hour (Radio 4) Anita Rani was leading a hugely involving debate (featuring Alison Weir, Lady Antonia Fraser, Jung Chang, Kate Williams and Tracy Borman) on history’s greatest queens. When the coverage did switch to the service at St Paul’s, presenter Eleanor Oldroyd did an exceptional job of bringing the ceremonial splendour and sense of occasion to life with lots of keen description and guidance regarding key parts of the ceremony. And, as you would expect, the soaring choral music (including Judith Weir’s splendid, specially written By Wisdom) lost nothing by being confined to sound alone.
That was never going to be the case for Saturday’s Platinum Party at the Palace, which was intended from the outset to be as much a feast for the eyes as for the ears. For the two hours before the concert, I thoroughly enjoyed Zoe Ball and Dermot O’leary’s backstage show on Radio 2, which featured some terrific excitement-building interviews with the stars – especially Elbow’s lovely Guy Garvey, Duran Duran and Andrew Lloyd Webber – who was amusingly self-deriding about his upcoming vocal encounter with Hamilton’s Lin-manuel Miranda.
At the last moment, though, I switched to television for the concert itself and I’m very glad I did. Otherwise, I would have missed out on some of the highlights of the weekend, from Paddington’s tea with the Queen to the spectacular light shows both on and above the walls of Buckingham Palace. I listened back later, on BBC Sounds, to some of Ken Bruce’s Radio 2 concert coverage and, I’m sorry to say, it seemed bizarrely disengaged, leaving viewers to figure out more or less entirely for themselves what was going on beyond telling them who was coming on and off the stage. A definite D for effort on that one.
Still, that’s just one gripe in what was otherwise a splendid weekend of radio. Well done to the BBC. I can honestly say that, without it, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the Jubilee celebrations anything like so much.