Where his mother’s crowning bathed the monarchy in uncontested splendor, Charles’s challenge is to focus a much more diffuse spotlight. Since then, the royal House of Windsor has changed radically from “a magical monarchy to a public service monarchy,” Bogdanor said, and “is judged by whether it contributes to society, and if it doesn’t, people won’t have it.” King Charles, he added, seems “well aware of that.”įor the king, a helter-skelter technological revolution has transformed every smartphone owner into a pocket cinematographer, hooked to a multiplex world of apps and platforms, uploads and downloads. “The monarchy was thought to be magical and untouchable.” When Elizabeth was crowned, “Britain was marked by extreme deference,” Vernon Bogdanor, a constitutional expert at King’s College, London, said in a recent interview. Fisher, then the archbishop of Canterbury, who presided over the queen’s coronation, was quoted as saying.Įven today, King Charles has resolved to follow his mother’s example by banning cameras from what is considered the most sacred part of the coronation service, in which he is anointed with what is called the oil of chrism.īut much else has changed.

“The world would have been a happier place if television had never been discovered,” the Most Rev. Some members of the British hierarchy wished to keep cameras out of the inner sanctum of Westminster Abbey, where the queen was crowned. In the presatellite, predigital era, British Royal Air Force bombers flew raw film of the coronation across the Atlantic for broadcast on American networks. Makeshift antennae were thrown up on hilltops to link the various parts of the British Isles to the central broadcast unit in London. The British establishment - including its nobles and priests, as well as the BBC - wielded exclusive control of the monochrome footage that would mold a generation’s memory of the event. British baby boomers, many of them small children at the time, like to recall that television in those days meant a small black-and-white screen in a large wooden cabinet broadcasting a single channel. In 1953, the queen’s coronation unfolded in a nation in thrall to a newfangled miracle called television. The medium, in other words, has facilitated a kind of blanket coverage of a message that would not have been possible in the 1950s.

While the BBC rejects these claims of partiality, there is little doubt that as digital technology has advanced over many years, the broadcaster’s royal coverage has become ever more sophisticated and comprehensive.

Zadie smith intimations six essays