‘Queen’s Day – TV’s Day’: the British monarchy and the media industries

ABSTRACT

In contemporary British history, Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 is typically imagined and narrated as the moment where television was anchored as a national cultural form. In addition, it is well documented by commentators and scholars that during preparation for the coronation, politicians and the palace had reservations that live television might fracture the carefully constructed mystique of monarchy. This article revisits the coronation to consider why and how television was perceived as a watershed moment for both monarchy and television, and what difference this has made to royal representations since. Using the work of Michael Warner, it argues that the mediated intimacies facilitated by television as a new cultural form encouraged viewers to enact participatory and active processes of spectatorship as royal ‘publics’, who are brought into being through being addressed. That is, it was the act of emphasising the centrality of television’s role in the coronation, and in reinforcing the apparent distance between monarchy and (popular) media, that these ‘meanings’ of the coronation were constructed in the public and historical imaginary.

KEYWORDS:

• Monarchy
• coronation
• media representation
• publics
• television history

On 3 June 1953, the day after Elizabeth II’s coronation, the Daily Express ran the headline ‘Queen’s Day—TV’s Day’. The story by journalist Robert Cannell , subtitled ‘Thirty million had the best of it’, identified television as central to the coronation by ‘set[ting] up brilliant new standards in linking the crown with the people’.¹ Weaving an in-depth commentary on the most intimate moments of the ceremony captured by television cameras—from the Queen’s ‘awed smile’ at the size of the crowds to Prince Charles’s ‘neatly brushed [hair]’—Cannell describes how television viewers ‘virtually rode with the Queen through London and stood near to her in the ancient Abbey itself’. In so doing, the article suggests television cameras democratised representations by giving the ‘ordinary’ viewing public access to a state ritual usually reserved for the privileged few.²

In contemporary British history, the coronation is typically imagined and narrated as the moment where television was anchored as a national cultural form.³ While some television existed before the Second World War, it captured public imagination in the late 1940s/early 1950s, and UK television license holders increased by 1.8 million between March 1952 and January 1954, which some scholars have attributed to the coronation.⁴ For the first time in broadcasting history, television consumption of the coronation (56 per cent of people) overtook radio consumption (32 per cent).⁵ By the mid-1950s, television had been ‘integrated into family routines and the spatial geography of the home’ and had expanded to include non-public service broadcasters, ITV.⁶ ‘Queen’s Day—TV’s Day’, then, makes a key point: the coronation was perceived as the day the Queen became Queen, and television became television.

Introduction

This article explores the media production of the contemporary British monarchy. More specifically, it will make an argument about the relationship between communication media industries and the monarchy by revisiting a key event in media history: Elizabeth II’s coronation. ‘Queen’s Day, TV’s Day’ is indicative of wider imaginaries of the coronation—in both public and academic forums—as formative in popularising television as a medium.⁷ The coronation features, for example, as a key case study in multiple critical histories of broadcasting industries.⁸ However, the relationship between television and the coronation has come under increasing criticism from scholars such as Joe Moran, who has convincingly argued that the coronation is merely part of a much longer history of television’s emergence in Britain.⁹ Likewise, Henrik Örnebring has proposed that the coronation’s ‘uniting’ effects have been greatly exaggerated, and he documented critical audience engagements with the event.¹⁰ But regardless of whether the headline ‘Queen’s Day, TV’s Day’ is actually ‘true’ in the way that the Daily Express intended it, what matters is the perceived importance of television to the construction of the coronation as a national event in the historical imaginary, and what the effect of this has been on public experiences of the coronation and the monarchy, both in and since 1953. To put it simply, what this article will explore is why and how television was perceived as a watershed moment for both monarchy and television, and what difference this has made to royal representations in the period since. The coronation offers us a moment where the monarchy can be understood as mediated and as an event. In analysing it as a key moment in contemporary British history, I consider why the monarchy might need to adapt to new media technologies, how these media forms can be used in strategic ways, the promise of (and anxieties about) a new industry of royal media intimacy, and how royal ‘publics’ are enacted through processes of mediated spectatorship.

In a broader historical sense, there has always been a relationship between forms of media culture, representation, and monarchical authority. Monarchies have been historically considered in the terms of theatrical productions, from court masques as a literal stage production of royal power and courtly entertainment¹¹ to the royal court as a dramaturgy of ritual, etiquette and hierarchy.¹² Kevin Sharpe argued that ‘Tudor authority was constructed and enhanced by the representation of rule in words, portraits, artifacts, and in rituals and performances’, while Peter Burke analysed how France’s Louis XIV was ‘fabricated’ through representations like portraits, bronzes, plays and court rituals.¹³ The development of print and electronic media cultures accelerated this further. Queen Victoria’s reign was ‘disseminated as never before by prints, periodicals and newspapers’, and inter-war monarchs used radio to speak directly to their subjects.¹⁴ Historians such as Edward Owens, Frank Mort and Matt Houlbrook have documented how new consumer cultures of the early twentieth century created a powerful sense of intimacy between the monarchy and its subjects.¹⁵ Wireless radios and mass market biographies, for example, partly facilitated the processes through which ‘the House of Windsor assumed its modern, ubiquitous presence as a truly national symbol which connected a mass public to the institutions of state’.¹⁶ Monarchy, then, is representation.

A disproportionate number of monarchial studies have focused on royal ceremonies, particularly audience engagements with them. Mass Observation mapped public attitudes to royal events from 1937 (George VI’s coronation), through to 1955 and Princess Margaret’s rumoured engagement to Peter Townsend. J.G. Blumler et al. explored public attitudes towards Prince Charles’s investiture in 1969, and multiple studies from Paul Barker et al., Clifford Stevenson and Jackie Abell, and Claire Wardle and Emily West considered audience engagement during the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002. More recently, Andreas Widholm and Karin Becker, and a special issue of Celebrity Studies journal, considered the 2011 royal wedding as demonstrative of the interrelations between royalty and the celebrity industries.¹⁷

Historians have paid particular attention to the 1953 coronation.¹⁸ The most influential account is Edward Shils and Michael Young’s ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’, published in late 1953.¹⁹ The piece has since been subject to a number of misinterpretations: Tom Nairn refers to it as a ‘slavering eulogy’, while Norman Birnbaum accuses it of ‘sociological generalizations of universal scope’.²⁰ Despite this, the paper raises a number of interesting questions about power, authority and meaning. Using Emile Durkheim’s concepts of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’, Shils and Young argue that the coronation was ‘the ceremonial occasion for the affirmation of moral values by which society lives’; that is, the coronation ritual functioned as ‘sacred’ and reinforced societal order by showcasing ‘ideal’ moral values.²¹ This Durkheimian functionalist perspective is part of the reason why Shils and Young’s piece has been so controversial in terms of generalising the coronation’s effects, but what this piece highlights is the role of community at a ‘communal occasion’.²² As an institution of State, the symbolic function of monarchy is partly to construct an idea of community and society: it is what Tom Nairn refers to as a ‘national spirit essence’ that is designed to promote integration and belonging.²³ Of course, people physically came together to attend the coronation in London. But, as Shils and Young begin to identify, this commonality was also achieved through the act of watching television, and its ability to unite communities across time and space.

Michael Warner’s work on ‘publics’ can be usefully mobilised here to develop Shils and Young’s functionalist perspective in order to consider how royal ‘publics’ are enacted through processes of mediated spectatorship. Warner suggests that mass media texts address a fictional collective ‘we’, and thus constitute the formation of groups (‘publics’) through active engagement with those texts.²⁴ ‘Publics’ more effectively describes the participatory nature of royal events than the passive term ‘audience’ used by Shils and Young. As Warner suggests, ‘neither crowd nor audience nor people nor group will capture the same sense’.²⁵ Rather, ‘publics’ describes active processes of spectatorship, and they are ‘potent’ discursive spaces which ‘exist… by virtue of being addressed’, (re)produced through connected and concentrated acts of representation.²⁶ ‘Publics’ are not pre-existing or independent, then, but rather are brought into being through active engagement with media texts.

In this article, Warner’s work will be used to consider television’s role in facilitating national (and imperial) royal ‘publics’ around the figure of the monarch during and after the coronation. If monarchy functions to construct an idea of community and social cohesion, ‘publics’ describes how this is enacted through active spectatorship. Or, as Stuart Hall would say, media does not just represent; it (re)produces.²⁷ David Cannadine argues that the ‘meaning’ of royal events ‘may change profoundly depending on the nature of the context’.²⁸ For the 1953 coronation, television was (and remains) key to its ‘meaning’, and hence key to this active spectatorship. Drawing on an archive of media culture materials such as newspapers, magazines, documentaries, television, and cartoons; statistical data from official reports and Mass Observation; and synthesising the secondary scholarship on the coronation, I will demonstrate how the perceived importance of television to the coronation implicated its construction as a national event, as ‘publics’ were facilitated through (the construction of) feelings of intimacy and participation. Furthermore, I will explore the tensions created by these new forms of participation in terms of monarchical stage management, and the ways in which these fears have played out in the period since the coronation. Nineteenth-century political analyst Walter Bagehot claimed that royal representations must be carefully balanced to ensure not to ‘let in daylight upon magic’.²⁹ That is, the monarchy as an institution must preserve a degree of mystique in order to retain significance in the national imaginary. What was historically specific about television at the coronation is the extent of intimacy it offered viewers, and this posed considerable concern for palace and government officials.

This article begins by outlining the preparations that went into orchestrating the coronation as televisual spectacle, in order to document the level of precision and control involved in staging royal events. I then consider representations of the coronation in terms of Warner’s concept ‘publics’, and how these ‘publics’ were facilitated through the (new) mediated intimacies of television. The following section considers how the ‘magic’ and ‘mystique’ of monarchy is itself stage managed, brought into being through the debates about intimacy/distance. I then address Warner’s idea of ‘counterpublics’ in order to demonstrate how coronation ‘publics’ were neither singular nor homogenous in their feelings towards the coronation. Following this, I look at restagings of the coronation in media culture in order to illustrate how subsequent representations have framed the event with reference to the perceived importance of television. The final section explores how the issues raised in the coronation have played out in the intervening years, as media culture and new forms of mediated intimacies continue to evolve. In so doing, I extend conventional understandings of what made the coronation so formative in both memories of the twentieth century and understandings of the contemporary monarchy.

Orchestrating the coronation as televisual spectacle

Upon commencement of preparation one year prior to the coronation, television immediately became the most contentious issue amongst organisers, who had serious reservations about the access it would initiate. Then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill, for example, argued that ‘modern mechanical arrangements’ should be banned from the coronation, and ‘religious and spiritual aspects should [not] be presented as if it were a theatrical performance’.³⁰ This statement fundamentally misunderstands the history of royal representation and spectacle as a form of power, as processes of mediation have always been central to the monarchy. It also established a narrative that would define mediations of the coronation: the ‘risks’ of new television technologies in relation to the magic of monarchy.

Initially, cameras were permitted to film the coronation procession but banned from the interior of Westminster Abbey.³¹ In response, the Daily Express and the BBC lobbied for live coverage by claiming it would invest the monarchy with ‘a new kind of legitimacy’ if the public were given a sense of proximity and intimacy.³² While Churchill worried that television would damage the legitimacy of monarchy by presenting it as theatrical performance, then, his opponents used an identical argument to argue for its use. This intimacy/distance juxtaposition underpins this article and, indeed, as I will demonstrate, influenced royal representations throughout the twentieth century. After intense pressure from the media industries, coronation organisers acquiesced to television footage, and in a press conference in May 1953 the Earl Marshall confirmed the final terms: cameras would be allowed, but the broadcast would be carefully planned and stage-managed.³³ In this section, I describe what shape this stage management took.

Coronation-themed televisual broadcasts began in the months leading up to the event. Educational programmes taught viewers about key coronation iconography, from the history of Westminster Abbey to the origins of God Save the Queen.³⁴ Sunday 31 May featured The Coronation Broadcast, in which Richard Dimbleby and Berkeley Smith explained the schedule of coronation day, and The Coronation and You, where a vicar described the religious ceremony. Monday 1 June included an educational children’s programme called What is the Crown? and a symposium of well-wishing messages from famous Americans called Salute from the New World. A number of television programmes documented celebrations around the Commonwealth to create a wider sense of communal feeling: concerts by Pakistani and Canadian bands were broadcast, and variety programmes such as The Commonwealth Gala featured entertainers from various Commonwealth countries.³⁵ Television transmission on the day began at the earlier-than-usual time of 10.15am with The Queen’s Procession to Westminster Abbey, followed by The Coronation Service at 11.20am, The State Procession through London at 2.20pm, and The Queen’s Appearance on the Balcony of the Palace at 5pm. Evening service commenced at 5.20pm with a special edition of children’s programme Tattoo, at 8pm The Coronation Service re-broadcast key highlights, before audio-only recordings of speeches from Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Queen were shown from 8.55pm. 9.10pm saw reflections from news broadcasters, before coverage ended with the Westminster firework display at 10.20pm.³⁶

Preparation for the coronation had begun immediately after George VI’s funeral in February 1952.³⁷ Those responsible for preparation were organised in bureaucratic hierarchical structures: the Coronation Commission included representatives from the UK and Commonwealth countries and was chaired by Prince Philip; the Commission created its ‘executive arm’- the Coronation Joint Committee chaired by the Earl Marshall; and the Coronation Executive Committee consisted of royal household, government and religious officials.³⁸ Practical organisation on the ground was undertaken by the Earl Marshall (Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan-Howard) and the Ministry of Works (headed by Sir David Eccles), which was described by local newspaper the Yorkshire Post as ‘the stage manager of the coronation’.³⁹

Jennifer Clark provides a thorough archival account of television as the key topic of debate between these various organisational arms.⁴⁰ After initially announcing a blanket ban on television cameras, various sources cite Churchill, Prince Philip, or the Queen herself as bowing to intense media pressure.⁴¹ It is clear, however, that even after acquiescing, the exact composition of the broadcast was carefully staged and vigorously debated. Churchill issued a statement on 10 October 1952 declaring there would be no close-ups for fear of too much accessibility, but an archived report from the Coronation Executive Committee bears scribbled pencil marks which delete the line ‘it is agreed that there should be no “close-up” shots in the television programme’.⁴² In the end, the BBC worked with organisers to reach a compromise: no so-called ‘Peeping Tom’ close-ups, but a zoom lens could capture ‘very special shots’, such as four-year-old Prince Charles watching the ceremony.⁴³

The positions of cameras in Westminster Abbey were precisely staged. Five cameras were restricted to designated positions and complemented by 29 microphones, and the cameramen were shut in boxed cubicles to disguise their work, demonstrating adherence to keeping ‘modern mechanical arrangements’ away from areas of religious importance.⁴⁴ There remained a complete ban on shots of the most religiously significant parts of the ceremony—the anointing, the communion service and anyone kneeling in worship—and symbolic shots of the Abbey’s architectural features were broadcast during these times.⁴⁵

On the procession route, 21 cameras were positioned at five different sites; and eleven different commentary positions catered for 100 commentators from around the world.⁴⁶ Loudspeakers spread along the route broadcast the service to crowds, and Westminster City Council spent £70,000 on decorations.⁴⁷ Roy Strong estimated the total cost of the coronation to be around £912,000, and the BBC alone spent £40,000 to deal with the broadcasting complexities of their largest ever production, such as hiring 120 staff.⁴⁸ The BBC did not have the circuit capacity to transmit the broadcast to so large an audience, and had to borrow 1,300 circuits from the General Post Office; while three new television transmitters in the UK provided coverage to areas previously uncovered: Pontop Pike, Glencairn, and Truleigh Hill.⁴⁹ In a perfect (and ironic) manifestation of the mediated spectacle of monarchy, the unprecedented scale of the event meant horse-drawn carriages had to be loaned from an Elstree film studio, and a shortage of professional coachmen also meant relying on volunteer elite businessmen and aristocrats.⁵⁰

Like the ‘Queen’s Day—TV’s Day’ article, much of the post-coronation commentary focused on the relationship between the coronation and television, for example, The Sunday Times hailed it ‘Television’s Finest Hour’.⁵¹ Some publications reviewed the quality of the television footage in addition to, or even as opposed to, the coronation itself. The Manchester Guardian published a commentary on 3 June 1953 entitled ‘Good Reception on Large-Screen TV’ which assessed the comfort of the seats in the Gaumont Cinema in Manchester, where the television footage was aired live, in relation to the ‘cold, damp greyness of the London streets’.⁵² Another piece in the same issue, ‘The World Hears and Sees’, detailed in which countries the coronation had aired and reviewed the technological quality of the broadcasts.⁵³ Meanwhile, The Daily Mirror reported on 3 June 1953 that ‘the B.B.C. had many congratulatory phone calls—and they were all justified’.⁵⁴

In emphasising the centrality of television’s role in the coronation, a connection was constructed between the two in the public imaginary. As described above, this link was established early in the planning process, as anxieties about televising the coronation played out across media culture. On 29 October 1952, The Daily Mirror reported on the ‘Coronation TV Wrangle in the Commons’, where Winston Churchill and MPs debated the decision (later overturned) of the Coronation Executive Committee not to televise the ceremony.⁵⁵ Once the decision had been made to go ahead with televisation, television manufacturers began advertising their sets with specific reference to the coronation. On 18 March 1953, Sobell published an advertisement for their ‘luxury 14” TV’ in The Daily Mirror, with the tagline ‘a crowning achievement for coronation year’.⁵⁶

In all of these representations, the perceived connection between the coronation and television was consolidated. This was not accidental; rather the relationship between television and the coronation was brought into being through active processes of representation. Regardless of whether the coronation was actually pivotal in the development of television as a medium, it was clearly perceived as such. In Warner’s terms, this can be considered as the facilitation of royal ‘publics’.

(Royal) television ‘publics’ and mediated intimacies

Warner conceptualises ‘publics’ as discursive spaces: ‘a public is a space of discourse organised by nothing other than the discourse itself’.⁵⁷ Moreover, Warner highlights how ‘publics’ cannot exist from a single text, rather it is the ‘concatenation of texts through time’, and repeated discursive formations.⁵⁸ As a queer theorist, Warner was interested in the spaces that individuals are allowed to inhabit, and the terms upon which this is facilitated. In adapting this to describe the coronation, I am interested in Warner’s conceptualisation of a ‘public’ which ‘exists by virtue of being addressed’.⁵⁹

Of course, in a sense royal ‘publics’ have always existed, as they have been historically addressed through portraiture, court rituals, print cultures, radio and consumer cultures. If monarchy functions to construct an idea of community, viewers of all these media texts are encouraged to recognise themselves as part of a royal and/or national ‘public’. The ‘publics’ in 1953 were historically specific because they were engaged by the particular promise of intimacy that television promoted. As a medium with a physical location in the home, television is tightly bound to the politics of the domestic, personal relationships, and their correlation(s) to the social, and this was particularly prominent in the 1950s when broadcast television meant a singular family set, usually situated in the family living room for all to gather around.⁶⁰ Television spectatorship involves the collision of the private and the public, and creates what contemporary scholarship on reality television has identified as ‘mediated intimacies’, which ‘reorient… the household space’.⁶¹ In their account, Imogen Tyler and Rosalind Gill argue that reality television engenders ‘the shifting boundaries of public/private life, [and] the rapid making and unmaking of publics and privates through and in mediation’.⁶² Arguably, the novelty of television did much the same work in the 1950s, creating new economies of intimate engagement for viewers.

‘Liveness’ further contributes to mediated intimacies. As Jonathan Bignell describes, most early television relayed theatre or music performances that were being viewed simultaneously by a ‘real life’ audience, hence consolidating the idea of television as a medium which permitted otherwise restricted access.⁶³ Live television’s ‘presencing’ effect unites disparate viewers into ‘publics’, and transforms ‘experience[s] of time and space’.⁶⁴ The coronation, then, can be usefully theorised as an early example of ‘mediated intimacies’ due to the novelty of live television and the proximity between viewer and event that this facilitated.

Feelings of intimacy at the coronation were described in media commentary and personal testimonies. The Observer commented on 7 June 1953 that ‘[i]n experiencing television we have experienced a new extension of our senses—and a major new factor in our public life’.⁶⁵ In describing how the televised coronation facilitated new ways of experiencing and understanding national events through the development of our ‘senses’, they propose that television altered the very biological processes through which ‘publics’ engage with monarchy. The tagline to the ‘Queen’s Day, TV’s Day’ story, meanwhile, reads ‘millions shared Royal Smiles hidden from the peers’, suggesting that the cameras permitted new terrains of mediated intimacy whereby the ‘ordinary viewing public’ triumphed over invited aristocracy and royalty.⁶⁶

This was also articulated through notions of time/space transcendence. One participant of ‘Media and Memory in Wales’, a study that archived oral testimony about memories of television in the twentieth century, said that the coronation ‘gave an opportunity for people who lived way out in the country… to enter into the spirit of it all’.⁶⁷ A Mass Observation participant commented on how this access is historically important: ‘we are fortunate today in being able to see and hear the actual service, and so the Queen is brought nearer to us, which is different to the old days, when we only read about these things’. They go on to directly compare their experience of the coronation to a memory of seeing Queen Victoria in person, and recount her ‘kindly and friendly smile’.⁶⁸ For this viewer, television afforded comparable intimacy to physical proximity to royalty, and the Queen is ‘brought nearer’ to them by virtue of the television set.

If, as Warner suggests, ‘publics’ are contextually specific, the characteristics of coronation ‘publics’ differ from the ‘publics’ created around, for example, a popular film, in that citizens are compelled to participate and perform patriotism for the monarch(y). Anne Rowbottom, who undertook ethnographic research in the 1990s with ‘royalists’ who travel around the UK to attend royal events, describes the royalists’ commitment as a kind of ‘civil religion’.⁶⁹ Royalists who arrive with gifts for the royals, for example, are not receiving the monarchy passively. Rather, they are ‘actively negotiating the messages, investing them with personal meaning and significance’ by inviting individual interactions with royal figures.⁷⁰ This illustrates how royal ‘publics’ are active, and enact their spectatorship by negotiating meaning in media texts.

There are also complicated, emotional, ritualistic and historical connections at play, where publics map their intimate lives onto royal events. A letter from the Governor of H.M Prison Nottingham reveals 200 prisoners were permitted to watch the television coverage of the coronation in the morning with mealtime postponed so as not to interrupt the ceremony, and in the afternoon they partook in a cricket match against prison staff.⁷¹ As the Governor wrote, ‘Coronation Day was not just an ordinary working day. The routine of the prison was adjusted’. Likewise, ‘Media and Memory in Wales’ found the coronation played a formative role in participant recollections, with many recounting the event as their first experience of television.⁷² Andreas Widholm and Karin Becker suggest that royalty acts as ‘an imaginary discursive space onto which people could project senses of identity and belonging, [and] intense emotional engagements’.⁷³ The coronation was invested with a larger significance than just the ceremony or the day itself, and ‘publics’ are formed in the act of individual engagement with monarchy across time and space.

There also appears to be somewhat of a compulsion to view and participate in coronation day, regardless of the strength of feeling toward monarchy. Shils and Young describe their interviewee’s ‘inability… to say why they thought important the occasion they were honouring’, findings echoed by Wardle and West’s analysis of participation in the 2002 Golden Jubilee.⁷⁴ Meanwhile, one participant in Mass Observation recounted: ‘I thought I was immune, but I awoke this morning with the feeling that this day was different, like Christmas or one’s birthday’.⁷⁵ This, perhaps, demonstrates the potent discursive force of royal ‘publics’, in that people were caught up in the coronation as a national event. However notional the attention people gave to the event, Warner argues that ‘the act of attention involved in showing up is enough to create an addressable public’.⁷⁶ They are being addressed, and hence brought into being.

While figures like Churchill feared television because it facilitated unparalleled accessibility, then, it was in fact these economies of mediated intimacies that contributed to the coronation’s success, and for coronation viewers this was conceptualised as a tool through which to make and unmake different attachments to monarchy as an institution of state. The mediated intimacies offered by television initiated new and novel ways of experiencing monarchy, as ‘publics’ were being addressed in more intimate ways.

The stage-management of magic

In light of television’s success, the anxieties of coronation organisers about televising the event seem anomalous. Indeed, a comment piece in The Observer recalled the debates 'with astonishment’ on 7 June 1953, and asked ‘how many members of that Council used television sets at that date, one wonders. It can only have been ignorance of this medium that so nearly led them to deprive the community of an experience which is now universally approved and applauded’.⁷⁷ In this account, it has been assumed that the organisers must simply have not been aware of television’s possibilities, and their experiences mean they have since been enlightened. In fact, the concerns about television as a medium were articulated in complex but interlinked ways, and again this played out across media culture before, during, and after the coronation.

The primary concern was around television’s perceived ‘low-brow’ qualities as part of the derogatory meanings associated with the term ‘popular’ culture at the time. Raymond Williams notes that one connotation of ‘popular’ was (and, to a certain extent, still is) ‘inferior kinds of work’, whereby television was seen as a ‘sign of “bad taste”’.⁷⁸ Scholars have also described television as a ‘feminised’, and therefore inferior, technology due to its domesticity in the home and tendency to address ‘the housewife’ through household management advertisements.⁷⁹

It would be another two years before the commercial channel ITV was established, prompting much wider social and political debate about television a popular form.⁸⁰ Yet, the coronation coincided with the publication of the Television Advisory Committee Report, which advised the government on the merits and drawbacks of commercial television. The coronation was repeatedly evoked in discussions about commercialisation and its impact on British viewers.⁸¹ On one side of this debate, some argued that the coronation had evidenced a powerful appetite for television amongst viewers, which should be catered for. Reader Vernon Bartlett wrote to The Times to demand that ‘viewers themselves should have their say’ about commercial television, rather than it being made into an issue ‘of party politics, with all the subsequent dangers to its [television’s] healthy development’.⁸² This suggests commercial television is desired by viewers, and should not be complicated by political debate. In opposition, the USA’s decision to air the coronation on commercial television with advertisements caused widespread condemnation in Britain for, as The Observer put it, ‘lowering the dignity of the service’ and turning it ‘into a commercial carnival’.⁸³ On 9 June 1953, The Manchester Guardian reported on arguments between the BBC and American television stations NBC and CBS about whether the stations had broken promises by interrupting the broadcast with advertisements.⁸⁴ A day later, a letter from reader T.C. Skeffington-Lodge was published in The Times citing ‘the sickening commercial aspect’ of the coronation broadcast in the USA as evidence of ‘the unwisdom of introducing the profit motive in the sphere of broadcasting generally’.⁸⁵

This not only impacted on cultural attitudes to commercial television more broadly, but also effected understandings of monarchy and media. In being cited as exemplary of the ‘risks’ of ‘low-brow’ new television technologies, the monarchy was positioned as comparatively superior. That is, in evoking monarchy as television’s antithesis, media representations actively constructed the monarchy as ‘special’. It is the very act of representing the monarchy as ‘above’ popular culture that the ‘magic’ of monarchy was created. This is illustrated neatly in one example: the ban on shots of the most religiously significant parts of the ceremony. The purpose of the anointing is for the Queen to symbolically become, as Shils and Young write, ‘something more and greater than the human being [she was]’.⁸⁶ Television coverage aired footage of Westminster Abbey’s architectural features during the anointing in order to fulfill the agreed ban on shots of the most religiously significant parts of the ceremony. This transmission ‘blackout’ can be interpreted as making the Queen’s transformation more tangible: the magic of monarchy is created in the gesture of hiding it, rather than being something that exists independently, since it implies there is magic to be hidden. The status and hierarchy between monarchy and viewers was re-established in the act of cutting live coverage. This interpretation of the broadcast can be expanded to consider the anxieties about televising the coronation more generally. The suggestion that ‘modern mechanical arrangements’ are incompatible with the significance of the ceremony works to construct the magic of monarchy in the public imaginary. In Warner’s terms, royal publics who are addressed as being ‘in awe’ at the coronation and in subservience to the monarchy’s majesty are actively brought into being through representation.

The ‘magic’ of monarchy is further constructed in its representational proximity to religion at the coronation. Indeed, borrowing the Durkheimian language of Shils and Young, monarch(y) is positioned as ‘sacred’ in relation to the ‘profane’ mechanics of television and the viewers beyond. The ban on shots of religious worship and close ups of the Queen’s face, for example, presents these two concerns as comparable in importance. Anxieties about close-ups of the Queen are demonstrative of what Jennifer Clark calls the ‘particular fantasies of disembodied, monarchical divinity’ in ‘the relationship between materiality and representation’.⁸⁷ That is, making the materiality of the monarch visible might dispel fantasies of mystique and divine power. Clark suggests these anxieties are particularly potent in relation to the Queen’s gender, as live television would ‘reveal the queen’s female embodiment and the gendered flesh of the monarch’, which may fracture public belief in her ability to execute the duties and powers of monarch(y).⁸⁸

While the religious aspects of the coronation were a source of anxiety in relation to debates about televisation, immediately after the event they became a source of celebration as encouraging television viewers to embrace Christianity. The Archbishop of Canterbury was quoted in The Times as saying ‘something happened… all over Great Britain and far afield, to countless people that they had not expected—an emotion deeply religious and powerful was stirred—and at a far deeper and richer level than is ordinarily reached’.⁸⁹ The Dean of Westminster agreed, stating that the coronation ‘enshrines the spirit of Christian kingship… of which so many multitudes have become aware for the first time this week—thanks to the miracle of television’.⁹⁰ One viewer wrote to Mass Observation: ‘photographs and printed matter… could never convey the majesty and significance of the service, like the TV camera did’.⁹¹ Laying the majesty (partially) bare, then, led to more engaged ‘publics’ who were brought into being through the active (re)production of emotion—as long as this was carefully staged.

These debates about intimacy/distance are themselves part of the mediation and staging of the coronation, and part of the audience’s negotiation with its meaning. In being repeatedly addressed, these debates become part of ‘public’ experiences of the coronation, and they reinforce the idea that any access permitted to the royals is all the more precious because it is limited. The mediated intimacies initiated by television have heightened importance in these narratives, both in terms of their rarity (and thus extraordinariness), and their risks. The debates about ‘let[ting] in daylight upon magic’ are in themselves part of the staging and performance, because they give the television footage extra weight.⁹²

Resistance and counterpublics

Critically, as Örnebring emphasises, this is not to overstate the extent to which there was a single response to the coronation, and indeed Warner’s use of the plural ‘publics’ captures the plurality and diversity of coronation viewers.⁹³ As Warner writes, ‘there are as many shades of difference among publics as there are in modes of address, style, and spaces of circulation’.⁹⁴ We must attend to the agency of ‘publics’ in interpreting and negotiating with media texts in active ways. There were a host of responses to the coronation that resisted the dominant celebratory narratives. For example in Scotland the title ‘Elizabeth II’ caused controversy because Elizabeth I had ruled prior to the 1707 Act of Union, hence had never ruled over Scotland. Protesters blew up or defaced postboxes bearing the signifier ‘E II R’; displayed posters reading ‘£2,000 reward for information leading to the identity of Queen Elizabeth I, dead or alive’; and smashed the windows of shops selling coronation merchandise.⁹⁵ Warner defines these type of ‘publics’ as ‘counterpublics’, who ‘differ markedly from the premises that allow the dominant culture to understand itself as a public’ and communicate different ‘versions’ of the object of attention.⁹⁶ Warner highlights that this group is often subordinate, because they act in tension with the dominant ideologies of society. However their contributions are important in terms of the meaning of the event in the public imaginary, as they have the potential to reshape or fracture dominant discursive structures and initiate new economies of participation.

Perhaps the most (in)famous example of coronation ‘counterpublics’ was David Low’s satirical cartoon ‘The Morning After’, which appeared in The Manchester Guardian on 3 June 1953.⁹⁷ The cartoon depicted a television set broadcasting a crowned figure meant to represent Britannia, and a watching mustached baby meant to signify the infantile nature of the viewing public. The surrounding living room floor is littered with party debris (bunting, champagne bottles), and the text ‘£100,000,000 spree’ is scrawled across the room. The cartoon promptly instigated 600 letters of criticism for being in ‘bad taste’.⁹⁸ Reader Madeleine Bingham called it ‘unsuitably vulgar’, while Edward Higham suggested Low had ‘overstep[ped] the mark’.⁹⁹ Ian Affleck wrote to tell the paper that the cartoon ‘offends the spiritual and temporal thoughts of the people’, and had ruined his ‘feeling that the British monarchy stood on the highest plane in the minds of many scores I had met’.¹⁰⁰ The coronation television footage was evoked by Affleck as central to these feelings: ‘the ceremony of the Coronation as put on record by the B.B.C confirmed these feelings’.¹⁰¹ Indeed, the newspaper itself gave recognition to television for facilitating such strong feelings of support for the coronation, and hence disapproval of the cartoon. In a commentary piece defending Low’s cartoon on 5 June 1953, they also added: ‘though perhaps we should have remembered that this time, thanks to the great technical achievement of the B.B.C., the emotion was really deeply shared throughout the whole country and therefore takes longer to fade away’.¹⁰² The newspaper makes clear that this coronation was different—‘it was, more than any earlier coronation, a relatively sober and serious coronation’—and they credit this directly to the mediated intimacies afforded by television.¹⁰³ In this case, television worked to close down criticism of the coronation by creating ‘publics’, who are active in sharing an emotional connection to the events onscreen. If The Manchester Guardian made the decision to be more mindful before publishing royal criticism in future, television was central to this censoring.

In talking of royal ‘publics’, one must also be mindful not to overstate the extent to which the televised coronation instigated a ‘democratisation’ of royal events. The tagline in the ‘Queen’s Day—TV’s Day’ story reads ‘millions shared Royal smiles hidden from the peers’, suggesting televised mediated intimacies allowed the ‘ordinary viewing public’ to triumph over invited aristocracy and royalty.¹⁰⁴ This is in some ways accurate, however ceremonies of state are still primarily concerned with reproducing hierarchy and legitimating privilege.¹⁰⁵ While on one hand the coronation played into sociopolitical narratives of postwar hope about greater social mobility and reduced inequalities, it was also indissoluble from traditional and conservative class hierarchies that entirely contradicted the socialist ideology of the new welfare state, for example. Again, it is the perceived role of television in democratising royalty that is important here, and the impact of this on watching ‘publics’. As part of wider research on the British monarchy, I have described the role of media in ‘producing consent’ for monarchy by disguising and naturalising class hierarchy and power, and the construction of the coronation as a ‘democratisation’ of royalty can be considered a key part of this process.¹⁰⁶

Restaging the coronation

In the years since the coronation, the event has been restaged in novels, films and television. This afterlife implicates its discursive meanings, and has the potential to create new royal ‘publics’ engaging with the coronation in new contexts. Archive footage of the event features regularly in royal documentaries, particularly those focusing on the Queen as a way of periodising her reign and establishing a narrative of longevity and continuity, which facilitates the construction of national publics who understand the meaning of Britain in a particular (royal) way. Elizabeth at 90: A Family Tribute, a behind-the-scenes-style exploration of Elizabeth II’s reign by the BBC, splices archive footage of the coronation ceremony with private video of the Queen leaving Buckingham Palace for Westminster Abbey, which pinpoints the coronation as an important event both publically and privately.¹⁰⁷ Of interest for this article, however, is how these subsequent representations have framed the event with reference to the perceived importance of television to the event. I argue that these representations perpetuate the narrative of a relationship between the two.

In 2003, the BBC produced an episode of television docudrama Days That Shook the World, which dramatised BBC producer Peter Dimmock in the control room on coronation day verbally directing the cameras and organising the production team.¹⁰⁸ This not only demythologised the filmic values behind the coronation spectacle, but also made them central to the historical imaginary. The episode narrates Dimmock’s anxiety about potential transmission mistakes, and the subsequent celebrations which took place in the production room when the airing was successful. The aim of the television series was to document key events in world history, and in making Peter Dimmock the focus, it is clear that it is not necessarily the coronation itself that is a key event, but rather the representation of it on television, and the concerns around this. Days That Shook the World narrates coronation day as a key moment for both the monarchy and the media industries.

More recently, and with considerably more viewers, Netflix drama The Crown mixed archive footage of the coronation with fully dramatised reconstructions using actor Claire Foy as Elizabeth II.¹⁰⁹ The coronation episode is called ‘Smoke and Mirrors’, which is suggestive of the inherent illusion and stage management of monarchical productions. Like Days That Shook the World, most of the episode focuses on preparation for the coronation as opposed to the event itself, from committee meetings, to construction work in the Abbey (including the installation of cameras), and debates about televising the ceremony. For many contemporary viewers, this account would be their only understanding of the scale of the coronation as a mediated event. Hence, it constructs a new set of ‘publics’ around this moment as historically important. The debates about televisation are dramatised in arguments between the Queen and Prince Philip (played by Matt Smith), which draw on many of the same narratives documented in this article. While the Queen is resistant about allowing too much access, Philip retorts that television will make the coronation ‘less ostentatious, more egalitarian… modern… forward looking’.¹¹⁰

Most of The Crown’s restaged coronation service is seen from the perspective of the Duke of Windsor (played by Alex Jennings) who watches the service on television from his home in Paris. This immediately establishes the role of television in broadcasting the coronation across geographic boundaries. He commentates to his friends about the ‘magic’ of monarchy and how coronation pageantry turns ‘the ordinary young woman of modest ability’ into a ‘goddess’. This scene plays on Churchill’s rebuttal of ‘modern mechanical arrangements’ by centralising the role of televised mediation, and simultaneously appraising the coronation service as transformative and magical because of this mediation. This paradox is reinscribed in the cinematography of the episode. First, real archive footage from the moment the cameras panned away during the ceremonial anointing is shown, before this splices into a reconstruction of the anointing featuring Claire Foy in extreme close-up. Although broadcasting the anointing in 1953 was inconceivable, the recreation of this moment demonstrates the shifting attitudes towards monarchy (and, arguably, religion) in 2016. The Crown reproduces the debates of 1953, then, while simultaneously playing with and subverting them for contemporary ‘publics’ who engage with the monarchy in different sociopolitical contexts. The Crown’s dramatisation illustrates what could have been, had there not been restrictions on television access in 1953.

The legacies of the coronation

In the years since 1953, these debates about intimacy/distance and participation/exclusion have been repeatedly waged. Television continues to play an important role in monarchical mediations, but as technologies developed this took on new shapes. This is most tangibly demonstrated in the 1969 BBC-ITV documentary Royal Family, directed by Richard Cawston and commissioned by Buckingham Palace for Prince Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales.¹¹¹ In direct contrast to the precisely positioned cameras at the coronation, Cawston used new techniques of ‘cinema verite, using hand-held 16 milimetre cameras with synchronized sound recording’ to follow the monarchy for one year.¹¹² The result was the ‘first fly-on-the-wall royal reality-TV programme’, offering intimate glimpses of domestic scenes, such as a family mealtime.¹¹³ This formed a key part of the then-Press Secretary at Buckingham Palace William Heseltine’s project to modernise public perception of monarchy.¹¹⁴ Despite it’s popularity, and Alan Rosenthal claims it is the most widely seen documentary ever made, the film was plagued with controversy.¹¹⁵ Although intended to democratise the monarchy, many were concerned that the voyeurism inherent to ‘reality television productions’ fractured the mystique of monarchy too far. Using language mirroring that in Shils and Young’s account of the ‘sacred’, then-BBC controller David Attenborough argued:

the whole institution depends on mystique and the tribal chief in his hut… If any member of the tribe ever sees inside the hut, then the whole system of the tribal chiefdom is damaged and the tribe eventually disintegrates¹¹⁶

Seemingly agreeing with this analysis, Buckingham Palace redacted the 90-minute documentary and the 43-hours of unused footage, and forbade all airings except for a ninety-second clip used in ‘The Queen: Art And Image’ exhibition.¹¹⁷ The documentary has since become a mythological watershed in the history of royal representations. Its redaction illustrates the strategy behind manufacturing public intimacies with the royals, whereby the line between visibility and invisibility is carefully towed.

The risks of mediated intimacies were also illustrated in the life (and death) of Princess Diana. In November 1995, Diana gave an intimate tell-all interview on BBC investigative documentary series Panorama, in which she criticised Prince Charles’s behaviour during their marriage.¹¹⁸ An exposé in extreme close-up, the Panorama interview is a precise realisation of the fears voiced by critics like Churchill in the 1950s. The programme fractured carefully crafted representations of monarchy to expose the ‘scandals’ beneath. Diana was always a figure of intense hyper-visibility; as Jenny Kitzinger writes, she was ‘created by media image… [and] destroyed by media image’.¹¹⁹ Her mediated life and death evidenced the consequences of the monarchy losing control of stage management, losing control of privacy, and becoming the hunted subject at the (other) end of the camera

More recently, the shift from analogue to digital forms of media culture has altered the terms on which ‘publics’ engage with royal representations. ‘Postnetwork, post-public service media systems’ complicate the terrains upon which television is experienced as a communal activity, as there is typically no longer a singular television set situated in the family living area, but rather a host of channels and platforms on which to view thousands of programmes.¹²⁰ The 1953 decision to ban coverage of the anointing ceremony would be near impossible now due to camera phones and social media; nor could organisers map the precise position of all filming equipment. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding in 2011 was watched live, worldwide, by two billion people on a multitude of channels and platforms, including the official ‘Royal Family’ YouTube channel.¹²¹ The palace also made attempts to manufacture media intimacies through new technological tools: the Twitter hashtag #rw2011 synthesised public commentary, an official YouTube ‘Wedding Book’ allowed users to submit congratulatory videos, and the Royal Family Facebook page utilised Facebook’s event feature so users could click ‘I’m attending’.¹²² Here, social media facilitated new economies of participation and new tools through which to enact ‘publics’.

Control over these representations, however, remains a pertinent anxiety. In 2017, The Guardian released secret plans held by Buckingham Palace, the BBC and the government relating to the death of the Queen.¹²³ One anonymous television director told journalist Sam Knight, ‘I have got in front of me an instruction book a couple of inches thick… everything in there is planned’.¹²⁴ For many years, the BBC was informed of royal deaths first, but now an announcement will be released to the Press Association and international media. News organisations will choose from a selection of pre-prepared news pieces and obituaries to immediately release online. Regular programming on BBC 1, 2 and 4 will cease immediately and merge to display one newsreader, who will announce the death before the national anthem is played. The television schedules will be altered for the next nine days, with no satirical comedy being aired on BBC for the duration. The funeral itself is planned in its entirety, down to the number of seconds the cortège will take to travel between locations. When the coffin reaches Westminster Abbey at exactly 11am, the country will observe a collective silence: train stations will stop announcements and buses will remain stationary. The ceremony will be televised in its entirety, followed by the cortège procession to Windsor Castle. There will be no footage from inside the royal vault as the coffin is lowered, but the commentator will describe the event to viewers.

The minute detail of these plans encapsulates the precision of manufacturing spectacular royal events. It is designed to take place without incident, and at a moment’s notice. Media outlets have their content prepared and their commentators pre-contracted, so they can be among the first to announce the news. These plans also demonstrate intent to inspire collective public feeling. Just as new television technologies facilitated various ‘publics’ through feelings of immediacy and responsiveness at the coronation, ‘publics’ will be constructed in the days following the Queen’s death, as normal television and radio scheduling is interrupted and the funeral airs live.

These observations of the contemporary monarchy are by no means exhaustive; rather they aim to demonstrate the broader connections and debates that can be teased out of the coronation case study in this article. These contemporary examples do not stand alone, but are rather contextualised in a complex history of media-monarchy interrelations. The variety of media forms used to represent historic coronations (tapestries, oil painting, radio) demonstrate these interrelations were not new at the coronation, nor did they end with it. Rather, the specific context of the coronation in a period of postwar renewal and technological development makes it a pertinent case study in which these interrelations became (temporarily) more visible, as the ‘Queen’s Day—TV’s Day’ headline evidences. It allows for a reading of the monarchy as mediated and as event. The account of the coronation I have provided aims to demonstrate how mediated the monarchy has always been, and how the contemporary media monarchy is ripe for analysis in order to understand the function and composition of the monarchy in contemporary Britain.

Conclusion: royal ‘publics’

In a press conference on 1 August 1952, Minister of Works David Eccles announced to gathered journalists: ‘for every ten thousand people who do see the coronation, at least a million will read of it and watch it on the screen’.¹²⁵ As this article has demonstrated, the use of television at the coronation initiated new royal media intimacies, as the monarchy adapted to new media forms that facilitated new terrains of participation. These intimacies were a key point of anxiety, as coronation organisers debated their merits and drawbacks and the extent to which they should be put into effect. How close should cameras get? How much should the viewers be able to see? I have demonstrated here how the royal televisual spectacle was carefully orchestrated so as not to ‘let in daylight upon magic’, as organisers precisely situated cameras and dictated shots.¹²⁶

This article has argued that regardless of whether the coronation was actually instrumental in developing television as a medium or not, what is important is the perceived relationship, which was brought into being through—to paraphrase Warner—connected and concentrated acts of representation, such as newspaper reports assessing the quality of televisual broadcasts. Although I have drawn upon the important (and underrated) work of Shils and Young in considering how media texts facilitate shared moral identification, this article has moved beyond this functionalist perspective to consider the importance of active processes of spectatorship, and the development of royal ‘publics’. In repeatedly documenting the relationship between television and the coronation, media texts brought this relationship into being. This could be developed further to consider whether media historians themselves have consolidated this perceived relationship in their analyses of the coronation as televised event. Moreover, I have argued that in documenting the anxieties of organisers about televising the coronation, media texts reinforced the apparent distance between monarchy and (popular) media, thus actively establishing the monarchy as something ‘special’. It is the very gesture of representing the monarchy as ‘above’ popular culture that the ‘magic’ of monarchy was created.

In revisiting the coronation and the debates about television, this article has discussed why the monarchy might need to adapt to new media technologies, how these media forms can be used in strategic ways, the promise of (and anxieties about) a new industry of royal media intimacy, and how royal ‘publics’ are enacted through processes of mediated spectatorship. In an age of digital media that facilitates new mediated intimacies, the debates of the coronation can be productively revisited to inform discussions of the media-monarchy relationship and how this has shifted across contemporary British history.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Imogen Tyler, Bruce Bennett, Edward Owens, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions on previous drafts of this article. The research on which this work is based was supported by the ESRC and the AHRC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [Postgraduate Studentship]; Arts and Humanities Research Council [Postgraduate Studentship].

Notes on contributors

Laura Clancy

Laura Clancy is a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University. Her research explores the cultural politics of the British monarchy in the context of rising inequalities, placing the monarchical institution at the centre of debates about culture and economy..

Notes

1. Cannell, “Queen’s Day—TV’s Day,” 1.

2. Ibid.

3. Kynaston, Family Britain; Pimlott, The Queen; and Cannadine and Price, Rituals of Royalty.

4. Gray and Lotz, Television Studies; and Briggs, The History of Broadcasting.

5. Media and Memory in Wales, “The Coronation”; Briggs, The History of Broadcasting .

6. Chambers, “The Material Form,” 367; and Briggs, The History of Broadcasting.

7. See note 3 above.

8. Verrill, “The Coronation and The BBC”; and Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity.

9. Moran, Armchair Nation.

10. Örnebring, “Revisiting the Coronation.”

11. Orgel, The Illusion of Power.

12. Elias, The Court Society.

13. Sharpe, Image Wars, xiii; and Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV.

14. Plunkett, Queen Victoria, 5; Richards in Olechnowicz, Monarchy and British Nation.

15. Owens, “All the World”; Mort, “On Tour with the Prince”; and Houlbrook, Prince of Tricksters.

16. Owens, “All the World,” 598.

17. Blumler et al., “Attitudes to the Monarchy”; Barker et al., “The Meaning of the Jubilee”; Stevenson and Abell, “Enacting National Concerns”; Wardle and West, “The Press as Agents of Nationalism”; Widholm and Becker, “Celebrating with the Celebrities”; and and Bennett, “Celebrity Forum Introduction.”

18. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting; Scannell, Radio, Television; Currie, A Concise History of British Television; Verrill, “The Coronation and The BBC”; Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity; Hennessy, Having It So Good; Kynaston, Family Britain; and Morra and Gossedge, The New Elizabethan Age.

19. Shils and Young, “The Meaning of the Coronation.”

20. Nairn, The Enchanted Glass, 116; and Birnbaum, “Monarchs and Sociologists,” 5.

21. Shils and Young, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” 67.

22. Shils and Young, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” 72.

23. Nairn, The Enchanted Glass, 92.

24. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,”; and Warner, Publics and Counterpublics.

25. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 51.

26. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 8; and Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics”, 50.

27. Hall, Representation.

28. Cannadine in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 105.

29. Bagehot, The English Constitution, 59. Concerns about the place of media technologies was not a new debate for royal events: the Electrophone was banned from Westminster Abbey at the 1902 coronation, and television cameras were forbidden from Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s wedding in 1947. This demonstrates how debates about how much access to allow the public to have to the monarchy has been an ongoing historical concern.

30. Easton, “Coronation.”

31. Fisher, “The People’s Coronation.”

32. Scannell, Radio, Television, 81.

33. Pathé, Earl Marshall. The Earl Marshall is an hereditary royal officeholder, now charged with organising major monarchical ceremonial occasions such as coronations and state funerals.

34. Radio Times, “Radio Times.”

35. Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity.

36. Ibid.

37. “Record of Interview with B.P. Barker.”

38. The Age, “Family’s Ancient Right.”

39. Ibid; “Coronation Press Conference”; and Creevey, “The Stage Manager of the Coronation.”

40. Clark, “Queen for a Day.”

41. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting; Scannell, Radio, Television; Currie, A Concise History of British Television.; Hennessy, Having It So Good; and Kynaston, Family Britain.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Scannell, Radio, Television; Ward, “The 1953 Coronation Ob”; and Verrill, “The Coronation and The BBC.”

45. Scannell, Radio, Television.

46. Ibid.

47. Ziegler, Crown and People.

48. Strong, Coronation; and Ward, “The 1953 Coronation Ob.”

49. Verrill, “The Coronation and The BBC.”

50. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting; and BBC, “On This Day: 2 June 1953.” This has interesting classed consequences: the classed identity of ‘real’ coachmen is very different from aristocrats or elite businessmen, for example, and ‘choosing’ to do this labour on a volunteer basis is very different from the day-to-day labour undertaken by royal staff.

51. Wiggin, “Television’s Finest Hour.”

52. Our own reporter, “Good Reception on Large-Screen TV.”

53. Our own reporter, “The World Hears and Sees.”

54. Davis, “These were TV’s finest hours.”

55. The Daily Mirror, “Coronation TV Wrangle in the Commons.”

56. Sobell, “Sobell: The Lowest-priced Luxury 14″ TV.”

57. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 50.

58. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 62.

59. See note 57 above.

60. Newcomb, TV; and Bignell, An Introduction to Television Studies.

61. Skeggs and Wood, “The Labour of Transformation,” 559; and Tyler and Gill, “Postcolonial Girl.”

62. Tyler and Gill, “Postcolonial Girl,” 81.

63. Bignell, An Introduction to Television Studies.

64. Scannell, Radio, Television, 84; and Marriott, Live Television, 5.

65. The Observer, “Television.”

66. See note 1 above .

67. Media and Memory in Wales, “The Coronation.”

68. Mass Observation Survey, “Coronation Day Account.”

69. Rowbottom, “The Real Royalists.”

70. Rowbottom, “The Real Royalists,” 86.

71. Governor, H.M Prison Nottingham, 3 October 1953.

72. See note 5 above.

73. Widholm and Becker, “Celebrating with the Celebrities,” 15.

74. Shils and Young, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” 63; and Wardle and West, “The Press as Agents of Nationalism.”

75. Mass Observation Survey, “Coronation Day Feeling.”

76. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 61.

77. See note 65 above.

78. Williams, Keywords, 237; and Spigel, Make Room for TV, 49 .

79. Keightley, “Low Television, High Fidelity”; and Wood, “Television—the Housewife’s Choice?”

80. Holmes, Entertaining Television.

81. Our Parliamentary Correspondent, “Development of Televison.”

82. Bartlett, “Commercialized Television.”

83. Buchan, “U.S Condemns Coronation ‘Commercials’”.

84. The Manchester Guardian, “The Promises Given to BBC on Abbey Broadcast: Americans Deny They Broke Them.”

85. Skeffington-Lodge, “Commercial Television.”

86. Shils and Young, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” 69.

87. See note 40 above.

88. Ibid.

89. The Times, “Dr. Fisher on Effect of Coronation.”

90. The Times, “Changed Conception of Sovereignty.”

91. Gilson, “Coronation Day Feelings.”

92. Bagehot, The English Constitution, 59.

93. See note 10 above.

94. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 84.

95. Sked, ‘Why the Scots Really Do This...’

96. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 81.

97. Low, “Morning After.”

98. Kennedy, “How Queen’s Coronation Cartoon Provoked a Royal Outrage.”

99. Manchester Guardian, “Low’s Morning After.”

100. Ibid.

101. Ibid.

102. Manchester Guardian, “Morning After.”

103. Ibid.

104. See note 1 above.

105. Cannadine and Price, Rituals of Royalty.

106. Clancy, ‘The (Family) Firm.

107. Bridcut, “Elizabeth at 90.”

108. “Days That Shook the World.”

109. Morgan, “The Crown.”

110. Ibid.

111. Cawston, Royal Family.

112. Pearson, The Ultimate Family, 181.

113. Crew, Britain’s Television Queen, 23.

114. Nairn, Enchanted Glass.

115. Rosenthal, New Documentary in Action.

116. Thornton, “The home movie.”

117. Ibid.

118. “The Panorama Interview.”

119. Kitzinger, “Image”; see also Robinson, “Maybe I’d Be Better off.”

120. Spigel and Olsson, Television After TV, 2.

121. Cellan-Jones, “Digital Royal Wedding.”

122. Ibid.

123. Knight, “London Bridge is Down.”

124. Ibid.

125. “Coronation Press Conference.”

126. Bagehot, The English Constitution, 59.