There is nothing I like more than a huge live event on TV.
I like it when it all goes tits up. Massive failures. Shambolic botches. Awkward on-air silences. The sound of millions of people rolling their eyes, and sighing. Or else, not failure, but an increasing sense of weirdness and WTF? Think of Michael Jackson’s funeral, when the R&B star Usher appeared to be trying to open Jackson’s casket; or the Royal Wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, when TV magician Paul Daniels got into a Twitter fight with Stephen Fry, when Fry announced he was watching the snooker, instead. That’s what fattens my goose. Humanity trying to do something significant, solemn, and appropriate—and getting it a bit wrong.
And, so, the weekend of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. A national holiday, and three days of televised events. All of which went a bit—thank you, sweet Baby Jesus—wrong.
On the Saturday of the Jubilee I go on my usual run through north London. It’s like an exhaustively planned establishing tracking shot in a documentary called The Changing Face of Britain: 2012.
Down in Finsbury Park—past Wig World and endless fried chicken shacks—urban Britain is making its nod to the Jubilee. Outside the pubs, drinkers—big men, in shorts—have staked out tables and benches. They exude the quiet, low-level confidence and skill of people who intend to be off their margins by one p.m., then remain that way for all four days of the bank holiday. They have an air of purpose usually seen in sheet metal workers cutting out car doors, or code crackers sitting down at desks at Bletchley.
One is wearing a cardboard mask of Prince Harry. Another has one of Pippa Middleton. This weekend, their job is to drink, unceasingly, to Queen and country.
Outside Nando’s, there is a double-sided sandwich board. On one side, it says “PERI PERI CHICKEN.” The “ER” in “Peri Peri” has been made to look like the royal insignia. It’s quite classy. On the other side, the message—which I feel genuinely speaks for the hearts of all customers—reads, “Thanks for the days off, Ma’am!”
Five chicken wings are just £5.20.
Running on, north, the road pitches up, the gardens fill with pink roses, and I am in Highgate—the dandy hilltop village enclave of bankers and millionaires. There, the window of the vintage tea shop High Tea is filled with Union Jack cupcakes. The hanging baskets have been fluffed into a Richard Curtis–like vision of English winsomery. The olde-style apothecary has filled its bow-front windows with bunches of lavender and British toiletries.
Yardley’s Triple-Milled English Rose Soap is just £7.99.
I turn, and start looping back. A mile away from home, and I return to privet-hedged suburbia. The sky starts lowering. The temperature is dropping. Summer looks like it’s being recalled. I run past the red, square Catholic church at the end of our street. There is a funeral in progress—the coffin is being carried out of the hearse, into a crescent of black-shoed mourners. It is draped in a Union Jack flag.
This weekend, even the dead are taking part in the Jubilee.
It starts to rain.
Back home, and the children are getting ready for tomorrow’s Jubilee party. Both are wearing the Jubilee crowns they made at school—eight-year-old Nancy’s is decorated with a picture she drew of the Queen. The Queen looks quite masculine, and angry. A bit like Bill Oddie when he sees an adolescent heron caught up in a discarded fishing line.
On Friday—in honor of the Jubilee—the children were excused from wearing their school uniforms, and told to come in “something red, white or blue,” instead.
“All the boys came in Arsenal strips,” Nancy says.
She’s making cupcakes. For some reason never quite explained, making cupcakes seems to be a vital part of this Jubilee. As if responding to some manner of embedded race memory, on hearing the words “Diamond Jubilee,” every household in Britain has automatically started dedicatedly creaming gigantic quantities of butter, sugar, and eggs. This week, it is an issue of patriotic duty to make small cakes. Our Queen sits on a throne made of sponge and jam.
In the absence of any formal ritual or schedule, such as with Christmas (stockings, massive lunch, EastEnders, standing at the bottom of the garden with a fag going, “We’re going away from Christmas next year—this is the last time”), Britain is carefully improvising its way through this Jubilee, using the props of 1950s tea dresses, bunting, charmingly mismatched china, red lipstick, and vintage tablecloths. In many ways, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee is the “Kirstie Allsopp Homemade Jubilee.” “The Cath Kidston Anniversary.”
Studying the origins of jubilees is of no help to our shaky planning—the ancient Egyptians held the first jubilees for their pharaohs every thirty years, by way of “renewing” their health and vigor. Their ceremonies consisted of the pharaoh donning a jubilee cape decorated with the tail of a wild animal, then running a race against a bull. Yeah.
All Egyptian ceremonies would then climax with the high priest incanting prayers to the gods, while holding up the flensed pelvis of an ox.
As the “ox pelvis bit” seemed to have been vetoed by Gary Barlow—organizer of the Jubilee concert—in favor of Cliff Richard singing “Congratulations,” instead, the British have been largely left on their own to work out how best to pay tribute to the Queen.
Each decision, of course, says more about the celebrant than the Queen herself, or the nature of the monarchy in the twenty-first century. Soft-porn men’s magazine Zoo, for instance, has issued a “Diamond Boobilee” special: “A right royal collection of the best British boobs!” including “A free massive poster—sixty-boob salute to the Queen!”
Royal perfumers Floris, on the other hand, issued the “Private Collection Perfume,” in an antique crystal bottle, hung with a “delicate gold chain featuring a white diamond,” and a hallmarked Royal Arms charm, for £15,000.
For those wishing for something in between tits and diamonds, meanwhile, there is Marmite’s limited edition jars, “Ma’amite”—normal Marmite, but with a thought about the Queen on the jar. So that even breakfast might celebrate the Jubilee.
And, in the meantime, there’s cakes. Cakes cakes cakes. Cakes while we figure out what this Jubilee actually is. Cakes, as a holding operation, while Britain works out just what the Jubilee, and the Queen—and, indeed, being British—all actually consist of.
In the twenty-first century all three remain, essentially, mysterious. If Britain’s unofficial motto has become “Keep Calm and Carry On,” its interim Jubilee motto is “Get Drunk and Make Cakes Until Further Notice.”
The next day, Sunday, is ten degrees colder than yesterday. It’s raining, hard. Summer is unconscious. In London, my kids are dutifully making a three-meter-high pile of cupcakes on the kitchen table—the rain having moved the day’s street parties indoors.
I, on the other hand, am now far away, in Hay-on-Wye, at the literary festival. As I eat breakfast, I watch The Andrew Marr Show, which has an interview with the pageant master, the man who has organized the thousand-boat-strong Flotilla along the Thames.
He is being asked about the catastrophic weather forecast for the afternoon, which seems to be specifically focused on the Thames and, microspecifically, over the eighty-six-year-old Queen’s hat.
“I’m hoping the cloud will burn off,” he says, with the “stay positive!” intense eye contact of someone who, deep down inside, is screaming an endless, silent scream.
“But there’s so much zeal and pride,” he continues, “I’m hoping it will reflect off the river, and bounce onto the people on the riverbank.”
“Good luck with that,” I think. “Good luck with that plan. Myself, I would have preferred a giant awning.”
The Andrew Marr Show ends, and I’ve got three hours to kill in Hay. The Jubilee must be out there somewhere, I think. I’m going to walk around the town, and try to find it.
Past the hotel door, the rain is tumultuous—it is coming sideways, and down; but also, interestingly, it is bouncing upwards, from the road, too. The scenes I had fondly imagined—trestle tables, jam jars filled with wildflowers, tipsy nannas, bunting, and cake, obviously—are resoundingly absent. Laburnums drip. Slate roofs shoot rainwater into gutters like a cannonade.
I walk past one house, garlanded with bunting, as the front door opens and a woman pops her head out.
“Perhaps she is about to start preparations for a street party!” I think. “This is the start of the festivities!”
She puts her hand out, and feels the rain—then scowls and withdraws back into the house. The door slams. This is not the start of the festivities.
I know I have not picked my location well. I am scarcely in a hotbed of fervent monarchism—I’m in a Welsh town that’s holding a left-wing literary festival. I go into a teashop, to seek respite from the rain, sit next to a display of silver sugar tongs, and order some Bara brith.
“Are there any Jubilee events happening today?” I ask the waitress as I drip onto the flagstones. “To honor our Queen?”
“I don’t think so. But I did just see A. C. Grayling!” she replies, cheerfully.
Having eaten the Bara brith—it’s some cake! my best contribution to the Jubilee so far—I go back out into the rain, and trail around the shops. In Britain in 2012, consumerism is the barometer of humanity’s soul. Have people literally been buying into the Jubilee?
“They were until yesterday,” the man behind the counter in the Green Room says. He’s from Birmingham. He has the impossible, nonspecific melancholy of all Brummies. “Bunting. A lot of bunting. But today, I’ve only sold two car flags.”
“Are there any Jubilee celebrations going on in Hay?” I ask.
“There’s something in the square tomorrow, I think,” he says, mournfully.
“Nothing today?” I ask.
“Isn’t one street party enough?” he replies, with a burdened sigh.
I cross the road, to Mr. Puzzles Jigsaw World, which incorporates Teddy Bear Wonderland.
“Do you have any Jubilee jigsaws?” I ask. “Colorful ones, with pictures of the Queen on—from all ages of her reign?”
“There’s just one left, yes,” the lady behind the counter says. “In the window.”
I have to say, I’m surprised. I thought my request was so ludicrously specific that I would get a definite “no.”
But then, as I stand there—holding the 1,500-piece Diamond Jubilee box in my hand, featuring over thirty different pictures of the Queen, from all decades of her reign—I realize that Mr. Puzzles Jigsaw World is a place that sees a great many specific requests. At the counter, a man, accompanied by his daughter, says, “You’ve got a llama one here—but would you happen to have any alpaca? She can tell the difference.”
In the hardware store down the road, the Union Jack toilet paper—displayed in the window—has been a runaway bestseller, at £4.20.
“How have you analyzed that?” I ask the woman behind the counter. “Is it an act of fervent monarchist patriotism, to buy Union Jack toilet paper? Or is it just republicans, wiping their bums on the national flag?”
“I don’t know,” she admits. “But our Reverend Charles has told us we mustn’t refer to it as ‘toilet paper’—but ‘bunting for bums.’”
This is Jubilee toilet paper that has been mentioned in a church sermon. God has had to intervene. That’s how confused we all are.
Back outside, the side streets are empty. The road is shiny black. Buses pass in waves of splash and surf. I take my iPhone out, to write down a poignant thought about the Queen, and three super-fat raindrops hit the screen so hard that they type the word “trr.” The weather is beginning to give the impression of sentience. No one will be out celebrating the Jubilee in this filth. Already slightly anxious, I suddenly am struck by a terrible thought.
“Oh God,” I think, in sudden panic. “Is it in my heart? Is the answer to my quest—to find the Jubilee, out here—that it is actually ‘in my heart’? Oh God, please don’t let the Jubilee be in my heart.”
Ten minutes later, and I realize what an idiot I’ve been. Of course the Jubilee isn’t in my heart. That would be ridiculous. The Jubilee is on the telly—where all the best things are.
One thirty p.m., and the BBC’s coverage of the Royal Flotilla begins. The BBC have already put an astonishing amount of spadework into the Jubilee. On Friday night I watched Jennie Bond’s tribute, which had taken the frankly left-field editorial decision to tell the story of the Queen’s sixty-year reign—but solely and only through all her visits to the southwest of England.
Stock footage of the sixties showed Britain’s cultural explosion: the country taking acid and landing in Oz—Technicolor and magnificent in floral minis, floral Minis, and John Lennon’s kaleidoscope eyes.
“But things were different down in the south of the country!” Bond’s voice-over said, cheerfully.
A lovely auld fella in a cap appeared. “What us lot were looking forward to,” he said in an intense Cornish burr, “were the Royal Yacht Britannia coming into the harbor at Plymouth. Boy oh boy—what a boat!”
The 1970s, meanwhile, were heralded by the fabulous, drawling decline of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”—“No / Future! / No / Future!”—accompanied by some footage of the Queen cutting into an enormous piece of cheese, with a sword. I presume she was in Wookey Hole.
The nineties were my favorite decade, however. Over pictures of the troubled marriages of Prince Charles and Prince Andrew, Windsor Castle on fire, and Diana’s funeral, Bond’s voice-over chirped, “This was the start of a time of turmoil for the Royal Family. And it was also my start in my tenure as the BBC’s royal correspondent!”
Because that’s how we all remember it. Bond time.
Back on the Thames, on Sunday, and the BBC’s coverage of the Flotilla was off to a worrying start. Settling down on the sofa with a yard of cake—lemon sponge! God bless you, ma’am!—and consulting the Radio Times, it became apparent to me, with increasing panic, that there were no Dimblebys involved in the forthcoming coverage. This was the harbinger of a terrible and dark shadow—darker even than the clouds above Tower Bridge.
I looked down the list of broadcasters the BBC had lined up: Anneka Rice, Sandi Toksvig, Fearne Cotton, Matt Baker, and Sophie Raworth. All perfectly fine in their place, on their day—but here? In a five-hour-long live broadcast that was going to consist—it was rapidly becoming apparent—of one thousand largely nondescript boats passing very slowly past the Wagamama on the South Bank? This was sending boys in to do a man’s job. Lambs to the slaughter. Osborne as chancellor. You just have to throw a Dimbleby at this stuff. It’s standard.
Almost the first utterance by the BBC’s commentator—Paul Dickenson—augured ill. Getting our first shots of the Spirit of Chartwell—the “floating palace” built specifically for the occasion—Dickenson seemed overcome with awe.
“Look at the gilding on the stern of that boat!” he said, excitedly. “Absolutely beautiful!”
On Sky, meanwhile, the perpetually saturnine Eamonn Holmes had a slightly different view.
“It looks rather like a floating Chinese restaurant,” he said, dourly.
On Twitter, the boat did not find favor with footballing maverick Joey Barton. “Dear Imperialist Nations—stop robbing the world’s poor of their resources and start examining the fabric of your rotting societies,” he Tweeted. Barton sounded like a man who had absolutely no cake in his house.
Diminutive magician Paul Daniels saw it very differently, however.
“LONG LIVE OUR AMAZING QUEEN!” he Tweeted—giving the impression of someone currently weeping Eccles cakes and tiny Battenberg squares while covered, loyally, in hundreds of first-class stamps.
Before the Jubilee, when I considered what my potential memories of the Flotilla might be, I had imagined a mélange of scarlet and gold, billowing sails, leaping dolphins, and foaming, crested waves. Hundreds of eccentric boats teasing their way past Parliament—in some kind of nautical cross between Wacky Races and Dunkirk, but in a good way.
In the event, this was not what the Royal Flotilla was like.
Just twenty-four hours later, my memories of it seemed oddly misty. To all intents and purposes, it didn’t really happen. There was no “there” there. For five hours, the television broadcast a sky as gray and cold as the river, with the odd boat slicing, diminutively, left to right, through the center—like a missed ball in Pong. We were just watching live footage of clouds sitting on London—eating the Shard, soaking Tower Bridge.
Aurally, things were just as scopey. Mics failed; choirs were blown away. Boat horns blared, endlessly, in a mournful loop—even as the commentators trailed away into silence. The impression was of some pale gray fever dream where you phased in and out of consciousness, but with your mouth full of lemon drizzle cake. For four hours, the BBC essentially spent millions of pounds broadcasting the inside of a cloud.
Whenever something did happen, however, it was often so surreal that you longed for a return to the mist. Everyone’s idea of what “interesting” or “spectacular” consisted of appeared to come from a different age: definitely one before the Internet, CGI, Ecstasy, or rock ’n’ roll, and possibly before universal suffrage.
The Spirit of Chartwell sailed past the Sea Containers building, which had been covered with a massive 100-by-70-meter black-and-white photograph of the Royal Family on the balcony at Buckingham Palace during the Silver Jubilee.
“I hope that was a nice surprise for the Queen’s party!” Dickenson said.
I’m sure it was—it depicted Princess Anne standing next to her ex-husband. Awkward.
“It’s the largest photo ever of the Royal Family,” Dickenson said, firmly—like a man convinced people at home might be going, “Balls! I once saw a much bigger picture of Princess Michael, at Hampton Court Palace!”
We then cut to an extreme close-up of Countryfile presenter Ben Fogle, who was in the midst of the Flotilla, energetically rowing in a tiny skiff, alongside Blue Peter presenter Helen Skelton. However, it was a bad time to come to Fogle as he was, at that very second, passing the Royal Boat, and had important work to do.
“Three cheers for Her Majesty!” Fogle yelled, dementedly, mic distorting, going all the way to eleven with his poshness, and thrusting his oar into the sky. “Hip hip—HOORAY! Hip hip—HOORAY!”
The camera waited for him to start presenting—but he simply shouted “HOORAY!” again, while beaming at Her Majesty. His priorities were clear: loyalty to Her Majesty first, broadcasting for the BBC a poor second.
Things were equally odd over on “the world’s biggest floating belfry,” where the living embodiment of “jazz hands,” John Barrowman, had committed to spending the next three hours “ringing a peal with Dickon Love and his guys.”
Observing Barrowman in the rather brutal-looking vessel—it was simply a massive floating box, with eight gigantic bells in it—he did look rather like someone willingly walking into a massive floating torture chamber.
“This is what it is to be British!” he shouted in his American accent.
Over on the Millennium Bridge, Anneka Rice was presenting a lighthearted strand—artists painting their views of the big day. However, the rain was so pounding that some of the paintings had literally dissolved. One artist—in desperation—had covered his picture with a cloth, to preserve it.
“Show us what you’ve done!” Rice urged.
As he removed the cloth, we realized it had got stuck to the canvas with rain—and the whole painting, in perfect reverse, was now printed to its underside, having lifted off completely. He held the sodden, flapping, paint-stained cloth to camera. By now, the wind was so high that the bunting was making desperate “dapdapdapdap” sounds.
“I love it!” Rice shouted, over the noise. “It’s so . . . Monet! It would be easier without the rain, to be honest—but we soldier on!”
John Sergeant simply didn’t care. Positioned on Westminster Bridge, he looked like a man who’d spent the last hour on the phone to his agent, shouting, “Balls to this, Paul! There’s shit-all going on down here, and I’ve just spent twenty minutes padding with Richard E. Grant about whether he’s wearing Union Jack underpants or not. You can whistle for your commission on this pile of fuck.”
Having only been thrown to twice in four hours, Sergeant’s last link was an act of profound nihilism, delivered with parodic Light Entertainment cheerfulness.
“I have to say, we’ll probably see more of the day’s events when we get home, on the television!” he said, with hateful brightness. “We’ve all been cheering the pictures on the big TV screens down here. Literally any excuse to cheer! Come on!”
He addressed the gathered, sodden crowd with a wild eye.
“Come on!” he repeated. “Hurrah! Hurrah! It’s just a simple, straightforward celebration! HURRAH!”
Back in the studio, there was a similar, terrible faux brightness. The One Show’s Matt Baker seemed particularly, sparklingly supercilious. He had the same air that he did when he asked David Cameron, disingenuously, “How do you sleep at night?”
Every time he said “It’s an astonishing day” to one of his guests, his eye telegraphed that he was finishing the sentence in his head with “. . . if you’re simple.”
At one point, he looked straight down the barrel of the camera with a fixed grin, and asked us, directly, “What do you think of the event so far?”
The Spirit of Chartwell passed a group of people doing semaphore.
“It’s not just people waving flags!” Baker said, as if addressing a child. “It all means something to the people who understand it. I should think it probably means something to the Duke of Edinburgh.”
However, the distress of Baker, Sergeant, Rice, et al., was nothing compared to the BBC’s main guy that day—the unseen Paul Dickenson, taking the Dimbleby Chair, and commentating over this scene of hypothermiating, rain-lashed pageantry.
Over the course of four hours in which—to borrow Spike Milligan’s description of the Second World War, “Nothing happened! But it happened suddenly”—Dickenson slowly fell prey to Partridge Fever: that unfortunate state of affairs whereby a broadcaster has to pad for so long, with so little, that they lose all sense of normal human perspective and humor, and start sounding like Alan Partridge.
The Spirit of Chartwell was not just the royal boat—but “a precious boat, with a precious cargo.”
A shot of twenty rowboats was “certainly a Canaletto moment—all powered by the human shoulders, back, arms, and legs.”
Another boat passed by. “I’ve got a feeling that, in that boat, are some survivors of cancer,” Dickenson said, without any further qualification.
After a while, Dickenson gave the impression that he’d actually stopped looking at the footage that was coming in. A fire rescue boat sped by—firing its water cannons at the crowd. Onboard, the firemen—being firemen—had positioned the cannons at pelvis height, for maximum lolz.
“A fire rescue boat there, celebrating in its own, special way,” Dickenson said, unheeding. Minutes later, he was summing up the day as “one of those occasions where you really have to be there to soak up the atmosphere. It really is electric.”
This over footage of a small child with its head slumped on some railings, in the rain.
My favorite moment, however, came when Tower Bridge opened up to let the Flotilla through: “An extraordinary machine, lifting an extraordinary road into the sky,” Dickenson said—unconscious that the rest of the country ended this sentence for him with a hearty “Ah-HA!”
For indeed, on Twitter, the coverage was not going down well. Stephen Fry spoke for the nation when he Tweeted, “This is mind-numbingly tedious. I just expected better of the BBC.”
Anyone who knew their Twitter history would not have been surprised when, minutes later, diminutive magician Paul Daniels Tweeted a furious reply. Daniels and Fry have been locked in mortal enmity since last year’s Royal Wedding, when Fry started Tweeting about a darts match being broadcast concurrently.
“WHO CARES?????” Daniels had Tweeted him, furiously, before forming an unlikely online alliance with eighties puppet Roland Rat (“I can’t believe this guy is so cynical! Off with his head!”).
When it came, now, to the Jubilee, Daniels clearly wanted to head Fry’s rampant republicanism off early.
“It’s a bloody sight better than football, darts, snooker . . .” Daniels told Fry, firmly.
And in this, Daniels had an ally in Dickenson.
“They say the Queen’s seen everything before—but she won’t have seen something like this!” he claimed as nine people in anoraks sailed a barge past her.
And, indeed, the world had not seen anything like it before. And the world was confused. On that night’s Daily Show, America’s voice of sexy liberal reason, Jon Stewart, watched footage of the Flotilla—the Queen, unsmiling, in the downpour, staring at a succession of barges and tugs—with increasing confusion and astonishment.
“Is this the British equivalent of a monster truck show?” he asked, eventually.
“No, Jon Stewart,” you wanted to say. “This is our Jubilee. This is what we do.” Somehow, being British is all tied up in ruined watercolors, and floating belfries, and the sight of a BBC cameraman having to clean his rain-splashed lens off with a tissue with a quiet “squick squick squick squick” sound. This is how we roll.
Have some cake. It helps.
Monday, and the Jubilee Concert. While there may have been national doubt about the meaning, and effectiveness, of the Flotilla, there were no such doubts about the concert. Putting on a themed concert, full of megastars playing no more than three songs each, is one of our great national talents—along with producing flamboyant homosexuals and great cheeses. We invented Live Aid! How difficult could this be?
Where Live Aid was organized by Bob Geldof, with the intention of aiding the starving, the Jubilee Concert was organized by Gary Barlow, with the intention of making Her Majesty tap her foot a little. And if—as a consequence of this concert going magnificently—Barlow should seem like a right and fitting person to subsequently get a MASSIVE knighthood, would that be such a bad thing? Would it? Does “Sir Gary Barlow” seem like such an unlikely invention? Does it?
After all, it wasn’t just the concert Barlow had put on for Her Majesty. For currently at number one is the song Barlow wrote for the Jubilee, “Sing,” which was accompanied by an hour-long BBC documentary on Barlow’s “mission” to include subjects from across the Commonwealth in its making: the African Children’s Choir, Slum Drummers from Kenya, Jamaica’s Jolly Boys, and Aboriginal guitarist Gurrumul, all contributing a rich global heritage to make “Sing” sound exactly like a classic midpaced Gary Barlow number.
The main difference between Live Aid and the Jubilee Concert was that, while Live Aid began with Status Quo and “Rockin’ All Over the World,” the Jubilee Concert began with a statement from Huw Edwards about the Duke of Edinburgh’s bladder infection: “So, sadly, he will not be joining the Queen tonight,” Edwards said, solemnly, in the very antithesis of screaming, “LONDON! ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?”
Over the next three hours, it became quietly apparent that, when it comes down to it, pop music is just better than some boats. Barlow gave the cake-eating audience what it wanted—Robbie Williams doing “Let Me Entertain You,” Sir Elton John doing “Crocodile Rock”—but, also, what it didn’t know it wanted, most notably with Grace Jones, stalking onto the stage in what appeared to be Intergalactic Sex Armor, and hula-hooping, imperiously, throughout “Slave to the Rhythm.”
There was a slightly awkward moment when Annie Lennox appeared onstage, blond, and wearing a pair of wings, and the actor Rufus Jones Tweeted “DIANA!!!!!”—but in all—as has so often happened—Britain’s ability to knock out great pop stars covered up for its awkward inability to know what to do with its heritage anymore without seeming slightly embarrassed.
At the end of the performance—after Madness turning Buckingham Palace into a terraced street for “Our House,” and McCartney’s “Live and Let Die”—the Queen came onstage, escorted by Barlow.
Gary had his most solemn “I’m with the Queen” face on. He looked so knightable. He looked like he’d momentarily considered pretending to drop a pound and kneeling to pick it up—just to give her the idea.
As the Queen gave a small wave, to thank everyone for coming, Twitter was still churning away at an incident that had happened earlier in the evening. Joining Stevie Wonder onstage, will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas had shouted, “Happy birthday, Your Highness!,” before launching into Wonder’s “Happy Birthday.”
Twitter had exploded with Yank-bashing righteousness—how embarrassing that an American should have mistaken a sixtieth Jubilee for a sixtieth birthday! How brash! How gum-chewing! How ridiculous that we had worried about what the Jubilee “is”—for, however much we didn’t know what a jubilee is, at least we get it that little bit more than the Americans, tsk.
But then, as the credits on the Jubilee Concert rolled, someone Tweeted that, actually, having Googled it, today was the Queen’s birthday, after all.
This meant that the big fact we could take from the entire Jubilee weekend—boats, fireworks, street parties, and McCartney—was that will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas is a far better subject than every single other person in Britain. And that, if you eat cake for four days straight, you will become very, very nauseous.