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‘The greatest show on earth’: Monarchy and media power

I have to be seen to be believed. – Queen Elizabeth II, circa 2015 1

We princes … are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world. – Queen Elizabeth I, 1586 2

Four hundred years apart, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II articulate the importance of visibility and performance to the monarch(y). As Running the Family Firm argues, for monarchy's power to be reproduced, monarchy must be represented. Elizabeth I's statement about ‘princes’ on ‘stages’ reflects this book's framing of monarchy as theatre. Theatrics feature more literally in histories of the early-modern royal court, where the monarch's daily schedule was a hyper-visible performance of ceremonial and sovereign power, from waking, dressing, dining and worshipping.3 Elsewhere, court masques with allegorical plots would glorify the monarch to reproduce their sovereignty (see Chapter 3).4

The royal image has always been mediated, and royal history is a history of representations in different forms. The monarch's profile has been depicted on banknotes, stamps and coins for hundreds of years.5 The historian Kevin Sharpe argued that ‘Tudor authority was constructed and enhanced’ through portraits, artefacts and courtly performances, whilst Peter Burke analysed how France's Louis XIV was ‘fabricated’ through portraits, bronzes, plays and court rituals.6 More recently, Queen Victoria's reign was mediated by newspapers and early film technology, and interwar monarchs used radio to speak directly to the nation.7 The historian Edward Owens mapped the relationship between monarchy, mass media and the British public in the early to mid-twentieth century.8 He argues that monarchs in the twentieth century used photographic portraits which were mass produced as souvenirs, and official and unofficial biographies gave readers behind-the-scenes glimpses at royal life.9 The case studies in Running the Family Firm illustrate varying, expanding forms of mediation: portraits, photographs, physical and material space, newspapers, magazines, television, films and social media, amongst others.

One particular point of interest about the quotations from the two Queen Elizabeths is that both presided over periods of rapid change in media cultures, shifting how monarchy engaged with the citizenry. For Elizabeth I, the emergence of a market society and new consumer cultures in the late sixteenth century created what scholars have identified as a ‘public sphere’.10 Readers consumed royal news like never before, sharing information using new print cultures. As Sharpe suggests, these changes brought both challenges and opportunities.11 It gave greater scope for distributing the royal image, but also made the reproduction and mis/uses of this image harder to contain.

Elizabeth II has reigned (1952 to present) over even more rapid technological expansion and socio-political change. From the emergence of television, through tabloid newspapers and paparazzi, to social media and citizen journalism (processes related to democratisation), the Firm has consistently faced new challenges in public engagement with monarchy. Due to expanding media forms, we now have more access to monarchy than ever before. I am interested here in the effects of this access. What differences do particular media forms make to the (re)production of monarchy? And what challenges might these new media forms pose to royal representation? Whilst some scholars have explored the media monarchy historically 12 and contemporarily,13 this chapter is the first detailed analysis of the media monarchy for Elizabeth II's reign, which coincides with seismic technological shifts in the media apparatus from broadcasting to social media.

Debates about the place of monarchy in a contemporary mediated society are given context within wider histories of sovereign power. The philosopher Michel Foucault argues that in the Middle Ages ‘the king was the central character in the entire Western juridical edifice’ and sovereign power functioned through ‘great state apparatus’.14 The sovereign controlled the army and police, the law was understood to represent the sovereign's will and the sovereign had the right to take life as punishment.15 This shifted after the English Civil War in 1642–1651 between Parliamentarians and Royalists, and the Glorious Revolution in 1688 where James II was overthrown and the Bill of Rights abolished the monarch's absolute power.16 Foucault argues that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sovereign power as it was known was replaced by ‘hierarchical observation [and] normalising judgment’, where power was exercised through ‘social production and social service’.17 Productive, disciplinary forms of power circulate through society. This relies, in part, upon theatre and spectacle to engage and inspire the citizenry, and produce consent.18

But what does it mean to negotiate with sovereign power – a monarchy – at the level of social media? Monarchy still relies on a form of invisibility, a form of divine right (although not identical to Middle Ages monarchs), and being above or beyond ‘ordinary life’. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, the Firm cannot be too visible to public scrutiny, or it loses its mystique and its complex infrastructures are unmasked. Therefore, visibility must be tightly stage-managed, and balanced with a paradoxical but co-dependent invisibility. Or, as Bagehot famously wrote, ‘we must not let in daylight upon magic’.19 How does this play out when live television offers audiences an opportunity to engage, in real time and across time and space, with royal ceremony? How does this play out when social media offers direct, public contact with the Firm (or at least with its social media team), such as royal Instagram accounts that abound on the same platform as their subjects’?

We have seen rapid technological and socio-political advancements from the Queen's 1953 coronation to today, that have (perhaps permanently) altered how the monarchy and the public engage with one another. In 1953, for the first time, the coronation was produced as live televisual spectacle. These new mediated intimacies posed significant challenges for coronation organisers in terms of how much access to allow audiences. As the Observer commented on 7 June 1953, ‘the Coronation must not only be the greatest show on earth but it must also be done with taste’.20 The debate over this offers us a moment where the labour of royal representations was made unusually visible as they navigated new terrain. Changes in modes of production allow us to see how the monarchy can be understood as mediated and as an event.

It is not only the coronation that is ‘the greatest show on earth but … must also be done with taste’. This dilemma haunts royal representations throughout Elizabeth II's reign, as new mediated forms are subject to judgements over access, intimacy and ‘taste’. The chapter goes on to explore key moments in the media–monarchy relationship since 1953, including forays into reality television, engagements with celebrity cultures, and social media (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter), which all facilitate audience participation. This is not an exhaustive account: other case studies would illustrate similar arguments, or develop them further. My examples illustrate how various modes of production affect how the Firm engages with its publics over time, how intimacy/distance and visibility/invisibility are carefully managed, and the consequences of this balance being fractured.

Staging the coronation as televisual spectacle

Television was a relatively new media form in 1953. Whilst some television existed before the Second World War, the BBC was suspended during wartime before relaunching in 1946. By March 1952 there were 1.45 million UK television licence holders.21 It was two further years before commercial television – ITV – was established, and the Television Advisory Committee Report in 1953 prompted debate about the impact of commercialisation on British viewers.22 These debates were concerned with television's perceived ‘low-brow’ qualities, due to derogatory meanings associated with the term ‘popular’. The cultural theorist Raymond Williams notes that one connotation of ‘popular’ was (and, sometimes, still is) ‘inferior kinds of work’, where television was seen as ‘“bad taste”’.23 The media scholar Helen Wood describes how television was perceived as ‘feminised’ (and therefore inferior) due to its domesticity, and its initial targeting of the housewife through household management advertisements.24

It is unsurprising, then, that, upon commencing coronation preparation, television immediately became contentious. The then Prime Minister Winston Churchill 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’.25 This statement suggests that the coronation has a purity of performance that should not be tainted by television as a ‘low-brow’ cultural technology. In so doing, it misunderstands royal spectacle as a form of power, whereby monarchy is performance and representation. Churchill established a narrative that would define commentary of the coronation: the ‘risks’ of new television technologies in relation to the magic of monarchy.

Initially, cameras were going to be permitted to film the exterior coronation procession but banned from Westminster Abbey's interior.26 In response, the Daily Express and the BBC lobbied for live coverage by subverting Churchill's language and claiming that it would invest monarchy with ‘a new kind of legitimacy’ if the public felt a sense of proximity and intimacy.27 After intense pressure, coronation organisers acquiesced to television footage, but debates continued over the precise details. Churchill declared on 10 October 1952 that close-up shots would give too much access, but an archived report from the Coronation Executive Committee (one of the groups responsible for organisation) bears scribbled pencil marks deleting the line ‘it is agreed that there should be no “close-up” shots in the television programme’.28 Eventually, the BBC and organisers compromised: 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.29

Camera positions in Westminster Abbey were precisely staged. Five cameras were in restricted positions with the camera operators boxed in cubicles to disguise their work, demonstrating adherence to keeping ‘modern mechanical arrangements’ away from areas of religious importance.30 A ban remained on shots of 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.31 On the procession route, 21 cameras were positioned at five different sites; and eleven different commentary positions catered for a hundred commentators from around the Commonwealth and the world.32

The sheer scale of the coronation makes it a watershed moment in the history of television as a medium. Simultaneously it was the first royal event broadcast live; was the largest production undertaken by the BBC;33 saw UK TV licence holders increase in number from 1.45 million in March 1952 to 3.25 million in 1954;34 was the first time TV audiences (56 per cent of people) overtook radio audiences (32 per cent);35 and was the first outside, live, multiple-language broadcast transmitted internationally within hours of its occurrence.36 The historian Roy Strong estimated the total cost of the coronation to be around £912,000 (over £25 million in 2020), and the BBC alone spent £40,000 (£1.1 million in 2020) to deal with the broadcasting complexities of its largest ever production when it was still learning how to stage outside broadcasts.37 Its unprecedented scale is demonstrated in the lack of facilities: circuit capacities could not handle so large an audience, so the BBC borrowed 1,300 circuits from the General Post Office, while three new television transmitters in the UK provided coverage to Pontop Pike, Glencairn and Truleigh Hill, which were previously uncovered.38 In a perfect, ironic manifestation of the mediated spectacle of monarchy, horse-drawn carriages were loaned from an Elstree film studio.39

Coronation-themed televisual broadcasts began in the months before the event. In keeping with Reithian values of public service broadcasting – to inform, educate and entertain, after John Reith, first director-general of the BBC – educational programmes taught viewers about key coronation iconography, from Westminster Abbey's history to the origin of ‘God Save the Queen’.40 The event's international significance – across the Commonwealth in particular – was highlighted with concerts by Pakistani and Canadian bands, and variety programmes such as The Commonwealth Gala.41 Television transmission on coronation day began at the earlier-than-usual time of 10.15am and included the procession, the ceremony, speeches from Churchill and the Queen and the Westminster firework display, before concluding at 10.20pm.42 To respond to international demand to view the coronation, telefilm recording was flown across the Atlantic by the RAF and edited in-flight to air on NBC and ABC in the United States, and CBS in Canada on the same day, which cost each institution around $1 million.43 This was what the theorists Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz have identified as a ‘media event’, staged as a large, historical occasion and transmitted live to inter/national audiences.44 Televising an event does not just re-mediate what already exists, rather ‘the nature of public ritual itself … fundementally change[s]’ because people's engagements alter.45

For the coronation, people's engagement altered because of the particular promise of intimacy that television promoted. Located in the home, television is bound to the politics of domesticity, personal relationships and their correlation(s) to the social, and this was particularly prominent when broadcast television meant a singular family set, usually situated in the family living room for all to gather around.46 As the communications scholar Paddy Scannell argues, live television's ‘presencing’ effect unites disparate viewers, and alters understandings of time and space.47 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’.48 A participant in Mass Observation (a long-term social research project recording everyday UK life) 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’.49 They directly compare their experience of watching the coronation to seeing Queen Victoria in person. For this viewer, television afforded comparable intimacy to physical proximity to royalty, and the Queen is ‘brought nearer’ to them through the television set. But what does ‘access’ to monarchy mean? How might this alter subjects’ engagement with sovereign power?

(Royal) publics, the ‘mediated centre’ and stage-managing ‘magic’

In ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’, Edward Shils and Michael Young use conceptualisations of the Durkheimian sacred to understand the coronation.50 The French sociologist Emile Durkheim deploys religious concepts of the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ to explore individuals uniting in society under a single moral law.51 Australian Native Tribes, for example, worshipped sacred ‘totems’ (usually plants or animals) as ‘collective sentiments’ symbolic of group membership.52 Everything outside of the sacred, meanwhile, is profane, and must be regulated. Shils and Young employ these terms to understand the coronation as ‘the ceremonial occasion for the affirmation of the moral values by which the society lives … an act of national communion’.53 Television only enhanced this, they argue, forming a ‘national family’ watching the coronation across Britain.

Shils and Young's work has been criticised. The political theorist Tom Nairn calls it a ‘slavering eulogy’ and the American sociologist Norman Birnbaum accuses it of ‘sociological generalizations of universal scope’ because it overemphasises the power of monarchy.54 But Shils and Young identify the power of television in representing and constructing a collective participatory event, which has been extensively developed by other media theorists. In Media Events, Dayan and Katz argue that television affords new ways of participating in ritual and increases the spectacular power of the event.55 They take a similar neo-Durkheimian approach in referring to society's ‘sacred centre’, which comprises a stable set of values shared by the citizenry.56 A successful media event integrates society around this ‘sacred centre’. Dayan and Katz's discussion of this process as mediated, and moreover that this mediation alters the event's meaning, emphasises the media's role in not just disseminating information but shaping our experiences of it. Indeed, as the media scholar John Fiske argues, the distinction between the ‘real’ event and its mediation has been eroded, because representation is central to an event's meaning.57 Or, as Stuart Hall would say, media does not just represent; it reproduces.58

The limitations to Dayan and Katz's reading are in the assumption that there are already-existing, stable moral values at society's centre. As Nick Couldry argues in Media Rituals, these are neither stable nor coherent.59 Rather, Couldry theorises this as ‘the myth of the mediated centre’: ‘the belief, or assumption, that there is a centre to the social world, and that, in some sense, the media speaks “for” that centre’.60 There is an assumption that the media is a ‘social frame’ showing us what's happening in society, and media institutions sustain that myth to reproduce their legitimacy.61 Couldry challenges the media's claim to centring, and instead argues that ‘media rituals are the mechanism through which that assumed legitimacy is reproduced’.62 Again, mediations are positioned as active: (re)producing meaning and shaping experiences. The ‘centre’ of society is constructed, both by the media and in the audiences (re)actions.

Couldry does not theorise the success of media texts in binding audiences together; rather he is interested in the ‘mediated centre’ as a strategic action, helping to formalise media's ritual functions. The queer theorist Michael Warner's work is an interesting addition to consider media affects on audiences, which he calls ‘publics’.63 Warner describes ‘publics’ as discursive spaces: ‘a public is a space of discourse organised by nothing other than the discourse itself’.64 A ‘public’ is an active process of spectatorship, ‘potent’ discursive spaces which ‘exist … by virtue of being addressed’ (re)produced through connected and concentrated representations.65 ‘Publics’ are not pre-existing or independent, then, but are brought into being through active engagement with media texts. What Couldry's and Warner's work does in combination – linking with Stuart Hall's work – is demonstrate how media texts do not just reflect society but rather construct it through representation. Publics are constructed around a particular event, and in engaging they give ‘consent’ for the monarchy to continue in its theatrical form.

This is useful for analysing the media–monarchy relationship, specifically the importance of in/visibility. Due to its scale, the coronation is typically narrated as the occasion when television was anchored and popularised as a national cultural form.66 It features, for example, as a key case study in multiple critical histories of broadcasting industries, including at the Science Museum in London.67 In ‘Media and Memory in Wales’, a study archiving memories of television in the twentieth century, the coronation played a formative role in many participants’ recollections.68 The day after the coronation, the Daily Express ran the headline ‘Queen's Day – TV's Day’ to suggest that, on coronation day, the Queen became Queen and television became television.69 This is mirrored in television manufacturers such as Sobell advertising their sets with specific reference to the day: the tagline to one advertisement was ‘a crowning achievement for coronation year’.70

Some scholars such as Joe Moran have convincingly argued that the coronation is merely part of a longer history of television's gradual emergence since the Second World War. But regardless of whether the headline ‘Queen's Day, TV's Day’ is actually ‘true’, what matters is the perceived importance of television to constructing the coronation as a national event across the historical imaginary, in critical commentary and in television studies, and the effect of this on public experiences of the coronation and the monarchy since.71 As the sociologist David Chaney argues, televising the coronation established the royal family as a key feature of the new medium.72 Media institutions like the BBC often use their coronation coverage to document their history, and in so doing claim their own legitimacy ‘as privileged interpreters of the social “centre” … by recalling that event and how they told the story’.73 The monarchy and the media form are linked, and both take their place in history.74

Likewise, an active process of representation positions the monarchy as the antithesis to ‘popular’ television. In being cited as exemplifying the ‘risks’ of ‘low-brow’ television technologies, the monarchy is positioned as comparatively superior. Rather than television fracturing the ‘magic’ of monarchy, then, the very act of representing monarchy as superior (re)created this ‘magic’. This argument is partly rehearsed by Michael Billig in his analysis of popular attitudes towards monarchy. One participant noted her surprise when, upon Princess Margaret meeting her infant daughter, Margaret ‘waved and … said “what a beautiful baby”, you know, just like a normal person would’.75 Billig responds, ‘only because the mother accepts the Princess as extraordinary is the normality worthy of comment. No normal person would be described as holding a baby just like a normal person.’ 76 As Warner would say, Margaret's extraordinariness is brought into being ‘by virtue of being addressed’.77

For the coronation, this is illustrated neatly in one example: banning shots of religiously significant parts of the ceremony. Upon anointing, the Queen symbolically becomes, as Shils and Young write, ‘something more and greater than the human being [she was]’.78 Television aired footage of Westminster Abbey's architectural features during the anointing to fulfil the agreed ban. This transmission ‘blackout’ makes the Queen's transformation more tangible: monarchy's magic is created in the gesture of hiding it, rather than existing independently, since it implies there is magic to hide. The status and hierarchy between sovereign and viewers was (re-)established by cutting live coverage, and the ‘myth of the mediated centre’ was reified. Essentially, this act connotes ‘monarchy doesn't belong here’.

The access that television afforded creates what can be read as a democratised event, where the public were invited into the Abbey and included in state ceremonial. This is not the same, however, as democratising the monarchy. As The Times commented afterwards, ‘yesterday, for the first time in perhaps a thousand years, the Sovereign was crowned in the sight of many thousands of the humblest of her subjects’.79 Rather than erasing the hierarchy between Sovereign and subject, television merely confirmed these boundaries by, as the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote, bringing ‘to the viewers a realisation of the Queen's burden, the Queen's dedication, God's presence and God's consecration, of religion and of themselves’.80 Whilst Couldry theorised the ‘mediated centre’ as a myth, upheld by media institutions to reinforce their legitimacy, this has a new imperative when discussing the monarchy. In some ways, the monarchy is the centre: of the British state, the constitution and hereditary power in Britain. Likewise, as I have described, the monarchy preserves the stage set of monarchies past by precisely strategising its mediations (although these might not always translate as intended).81 The debates about intimacy/distance reify the monarchy as the ‘centre’ by highlighting its superiority, and reinforcing that any access permitted to the royals is more precious because it is limited. These debates take an interesting turn as media forms expand and develop throughout the twentieth century.

Reality television, royal ‘soap opera’ and the (classed) politics of taste

If the coronation illustrates the Firm's first, tentative forays into television, over the next few decades this developed as television matured its technological capacities, in the context of ‘publics’ transforming their relationships to democracy. The historian David Cannadine suggests that these demonstrate the continued ‘invention of tradition’ in royal cultural forms, as boundaries between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are negotiated in response to changing societies.82 By the 1960s, there were extended television hours, more choice of channels, colour television, new filming techniques and growing audiences.83 The Queen's Christmas message was first televised in 1957, giving audiences annual access to their sovereign as part of a mediated ritual. Again, ordinary and extraordinary coalesced through direct contact with the Queen from inside Buckingham Palace, who said ‘I very much hope … that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct … I welcome you to the peace of my own home’.84

Developments in monarchy's relationship to television are best illustrated in the 1969 BBC–ITV documentary Royal Family, directed by Richard Cawston and commissioned by Buckingham Palace.85 By the late 1960s – perhaps due to the decade's new subcultures, shifting attitudes towards sexual politics and growing consumerism – the popularity of monarchy during the coronation had waned. In 1965, the Sunday Telegraph claimed that the Queen was seen as ‘the arch-square’ among young people, who felt the monarchy was old-fashioned.86 In response, the then Press Secretary William Heseltine initiated a project to modernise public perception of monarchy by promoting Prince Charles's Investiture in 1969 (which, itself, was broadcast on television) using two ‘informal’ documentaries: one interview with Charles, and the documentary Royal Family.87 In contrast to the precisely positioned coronation cameras, Royal Family used new techniques of ‘cinéma vérité, using hand-held 16-millimetre cameras with synchronized sound recording’ to follow the monarchy for one year.88 The result was the ‘first fly-on-the-wall royal reality-TV programme’, offering intimate glimpses of domestic scenes, such as family mealtimes (Figure 2.1), a family barbecue and the Queen taking the infant Prince Edward to a sweet shop.89 Despite its popularity, and the film-maker Alan Rosenthal claims that it is the most widely seen documentary ever made, the programme was controversial.90 Many were concerned that the voyeuristic style fractured the mystique of monarchy too far. Using language mirroring Shils and Young's account of the ‘sacred’ and Foucault's on sovereign power, the then BBC controller David Attenborough argued:

2.1 Still from *Royal Family* documentary, BBC/ITV, 1969

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 disintegrates.91

Seemingly thinking similarly, Buckingham Palace redacted the 90-minute documentary and 43 hours of unused footage, forbidding all airings except short clips used in exhibitions and documentaries.92 Royal Family has since become a mythological watershed in royal representational history. Its redaction illustrates how precisely the line between visibility and invisibility is toed in royal media texts. Reality television as a genre has claims to ‘realism’: representing something that ‘actually happened’.93 Contemporary media scholarship contests this to suggest that it actually ‘manipulates and constructs “the real”’, and indeed Royal Family was distilled from 43 hours of footage into a two-hour documentary.94 But if reality television connotes ‘realism’, this complicates royal representations in this form: viewing the Queen preparing salad for a barbecue is more intimate than a close-up of her face during a religious ceremony. The carefully crafted mystique of monarchy is fractured by representations that make claims to ‘the real’, to which monarchy is necessarily positioned as superior. In a discussion of using social media, the scholars Alice Marwick and danah boyd use the phrase ‘context collapse’ to describe how social media collapse distinct contexts of time and space and unite otherwise discrete audiences (e.g. celebrity and fan), who all abound on the same platform.95 I suggest that Royal Family failed precisely because it was ‘context collapse’, whereby the ‘distance’ the monarchy relies upon and the ‘centre’ it represents – which distinguishes monarchy from celebrity – disappears. And so monarchy collapses into media.

Reality television attracts further criticism from cultural commentators for having ‘low’ cultural value, as part of the shift to ‘spectacular’ television over the perceived ‘substance’ of earlier documentaries.96 These derogatory associations are both gendered and classed: reality television has subsumed associations with femininity and domesticity,97 and so-called ‘trash TV’ can ‘be located as a judgment which justifies its moral and aesthetic criteria within ideological discourses’ embedded in class hierarchy.98 For the Firm to engage with this genre becomes – like original debates about the coronation – an issue of class, taste and respectability.

Some scholars and commentators have associated the Firm with another televisual genre associated with connotations of ‘low’ cultural value. In a 1984 essay, Rosalind Coward referred to the monarchy as The Royals: ‘the longest-running soap opera in Britain’.99 Coward argued that the rise of the soap opera genre in the 1950s coincides with shifting attitudes to monarchy in media culture, which has provided more intimate coverage of the royals.100 The Royals, she argues, follows ‘the conventions of a family melodrama … preoccupied with sexual relations, marriage, the unity of the family, internal conflict … and the disintegration of the family’.101 The narrative form of soap opera as a ‘continuous serial’ mirrors the ‘continuous serial’ of monarchy.102 I document this process in this book, as new figures come and go from the royal stage and give the Firm access to new markets.

Coward describes how this works positively for the Firm:

the ways in which the story is told means that we never have to deal with the Royal family as a political institution; we only have to think about human behaviour, human emotions, and choices restricted to the family 103

Here, melodrama is a form of distraction, and of ‘producing consent’.104 It becomes, as we saw previously from the ex-Director of Royal Communications Sally Osman, about ‘a distinction between what we do to articulate the Monarchy, and its purpose and value, and then the role that each of the individuals play within that story’.105 Indeed, the pantomime of royal ‘scandal’, criticism and resolution is a recurring trope of royal representations (see Chapter 6). For other commentators, the royal soap becomes an issue of taste. In a controversial piece for the New Statesman in 1955, entitled ‘The Royal Soap Opera’, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge claimed ‘this is history, not The Archers, and their affairs ought to be treated as such’.106 Here, ‘the royal soap opera’ is sensationalist and undignified: in direct opposition to traditionalist, ‘substantive’ history. Indeed, soap opera as a genre is often associated with low-culture.107 For Muggeridge, describing monarchy as such demystifies it too far.

The year 1987 brought another example of the Firm subject to what I have called ‘context collapse’.108 It's a Royal Knockout was a BBC charity event, based on the slapstick television gameshow It's a Knockout, which featured celebrities undertaking games and tasks in fancy dress.109 The episode included Princes Andrew and Edward, Princess Anne and Sarah Ferguson (then Prince Andrew's wife; they divorced in 1996), each captaining a celebrity team while dressed in mock-Tudor costumes (Figure 2.2). As with Royal Family, the audience figures of 18 million suggested a success.110 Yet, reactions were critical, drawing again on language of access and intimacy; specifically, in this case, ‘the irruption of showbiz into the royal world’.111 The royal historian Ben Pimlott claimed that ‘one of the mistakes of Knockout was that it gave the impression of the Royal Family using their privileged access to the media to sell themselves’.112 Of course, all royal representation sells monarchy. Yet because It’s a Royal Knockout specifically used the tenets of celebrity culture and earlier variety performances (similarly associated with low culture), this marketing ploy was exposed. The journalist Daniel Roseman writes that ‘the young royals inadvertently mocked the real costumes and ceremonies of their own House of Windsor’.113 The show became a type of metatheatre (the metamonarchy), where the royals emphasised how all monarchy is a stage show with costumes, crews and equipment. The ‘context collapse’ here, then, extends to the institution itself being revealed as gimmick.114 The ‘centre’ was, once again, erased.

2.2 The royals on *It's a Royal Knockout,* BBC, 1987

An interesting addition to royal soap opera is the Netflix drama The Crown.115 The Crown is a historical television series about the reign of Elizabeth II, with events from 1947 (the wedding of the Queen and Philip) onwards (including the coronation and the Royal Family documentary) dramatised as part-fictional retellings with actors. The series has received multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, and, as of January 2020, 73 million global households with a Netflix account (out of 158 million) had watched it.116

The Crown is not ‘official’, hence it is not part of the Firm's public relations package in the same way as Royal Family or It's a Royal Knockout. Yet, similar debates about in/visibility are used by commentators to debate its place in popular culture. The political journalist John Sergeant claimed that The Crown is ‘dangerous’ for the Firm because it erodes distance and mystique, and monarchy is not a ‘multi-million blockbuster’ (again, implying issues of taste and respectability).117 Others argue that The Crown functions as royal ‘propaganda’.118 The royal biographer Robert Lacey claims that The Crown humanises the royals, and the historian Greg Jenner says it ‘depicts [their life as] a soap opera, which… makes them seem more like celebrities’.119 Analysing a comparable royal melodrama biopic, the 2006 film The Queen, Mandy Merck argued that the ‘transfer of spectatorial sympathy represents a political coup de théâtre’, whereby real criticisms of the Queen's lack of public response to Princess Diana's death in 1997 were rewritten and reclaimed in filmic scenes depicting the monarch as quietly emotional.120 Likewise, moments such as intense debates over television at the coronation, and the redaction of Royal Family, are dramatised in The Crown in ways which prompt sympathy, and circumvent political questions of accountability, funding or access.

Whilst Sergeant argued ‘there used to be clear rules about depicting people who are still alive’ – referring to laws stating that no monarch could be depicted in restagings until a hundred years after their death 121 – to justify his criticism of The Crown, this also works in contention of Sergeant's position. Dramatic restagings of present monarch(ie)s can influence and shape public responses. Whilst The Crown does sometimes critique monarchy – Series Four was particularly critical of Charles's treatment of Diana, for example – it also glamorises it. Netflix is central to the shift to digital television – ‘television after TV’ – where high-budget, serialised television narratives like Game of Thrones122 and Stranger Things123 display filmic aesthetics and transcend historical connotations of television as ‘low taste’.124 For the monarchy to feature in this transition is a powerful representational tool. Whilst The Crown blurs the in/visibility line by offering intimate ‘access’ to monarchy (albeit a contrived version), Netflix is vital to its ‘success’ as a representational tool. David Cannadine points towards Shakespeare plays, a similar form of dramatised royal biography to The Crown, as historical representations of monarchy which focus upon royal drama and disputes.125 Yet, they do not damage monarchy's majesty because they are within boundaries of cultural ‘taste’. Like The Crown, they humanise royals while simultaneously mythologising and canonising them. The Crown also functions as what the scholar Andrew Higson and others term a heritage production, where history is marketed and consumed through media texts.126 Downton Abbey, a comparable television period drama about an aristocratic family, has been critiqued as romanticising a conservative, nostalgic version of Englishness which glamorises classed, gendered and racialised hierarchies.127 In The Crown, monarchy's class hierarchies are (re)produced as entertainment for viewing publics.

Tabloid and celebrity cultures

Other media technologies have expanded during the Queen's reign, which further develop the in/visibility debate. The author Ryan Linkof argues that, upon emerging as cultural intermediaries in the early 1900s, tabloid press photographers established a new style of celebrity photography aiming to capture unposed, apparently authentic images with a sense of immediacy.128 Like television, then, tabloid cultures posed challenges to the Firm's in/visibility. The scholars Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy track the monarchy–tabloid relationship, arguing that it shifts between reverence and lampooning. Whilst George IV (1820–1830) and William IV (1830–1837) were satirised in news media to protest against hereditary wealth, by Victoria's reign monarchy was associated with a global Empire, prompting years of effusive coverage.129

This shifted upon Edward VIII's relationship with the American socialite Wallis Simpson. Edward was ‘Britain's answer to the Hollywood stars of the 1920s’, with his public and private activities reported as new ‘human-interest journalism’.130 But despite extensive international reports, Edward and Wallis's affair was absent from the UK press until Edward's abdication in 1936 was imminent, due to attempts to shelter the royals from new mass media technologies.131 Post-abdication, press photographers – whom we now recognise as paparazzi – were central to exposing their affair, harbingering tabloid behaviour in the twenty-first century. A long-lens photograph of Edward and Wallis on holiday, for example, is now a common trope of celebrity culture.132 Like live televising the coronation, monarchy was again key in establishing popular media practices. Photojournalism also illustrates the blurring of royalty with celebrity culture, where deference weakened and the public wanted access to royal drama. This is perhaps best illustrated through Princess Margaret and Princess Diana.

From the 1940s onwards, Margaret was the subject of intense tabloid speculation. In 1949, aged eighteen, she was photographed wearing a bathing suit on holiday in Capri, prompting arguments between journalists about in/appropriate royal images.133 Inter/national magazines and newspapers covered her clothing, her potential boyfriends, her celebrity friends and her partying.134 Whilst intimate shots of the Queen at the coronation were controlled, a tabloid reporter spotted an intimate moment during the ceremony between Margaret and Captain Peter Townsend, a former adviser of her father King George VI and a divorced man, when she brushed lint from his jacket.135 The coverage of this as gossip in international newspapers directly contradicted the ‘mystique’ of monarchy at the coronation, raising questions about which royals must be ‘invisible’ to public scrutiny.

Margaret married Antony Armstrong-Jones, a society photographer, demonstrating a union of the royals and celebrity culture.136 In 1976, Margaret was photographed on the luxury private island of Mustique with Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener and aristocrat seventeen years her junior, with whom tabloids reported she was having an affair.137 The blurry long-lens photographs, of a kind now commonplace in celebrity gossip magazines, drew attention to the party lifestyle Margaret was enjoying using taxpayers’ money.138 Her eventual divorce from Armstrong-Jones in 1978 again became a tabloid ‘scandal’.139 The personal details of Margaret's life made her the first royal manufactured for the tabloid and celebrity era.

Diana's life and death were also extensively documented by the popular media. Much has been written about Diana and the media, from analysis of representations of her as the ‘people's princess’ to the power of media ritual at her funeral.140 I will not dwell on these arguments here. More relevant is how Diana used the media, particularly after divorcing Charles, to differentiate herself from the Firm, and how this meant that the monarchy lost control of the narrative. Once again, losing stage-management coincides with emerging media forms, to which the Firm must respond reactively. Diana's candid 1995 interview on BBC's Panorama programme, in which she accused Charles of an affair and the monarchy of exploiting her, reified representations of Diana as ‘the people's princess’, used and bullied by a heartless institution (see Chapter 5 for an analysis of this as a ‘confessional’).141 This influenced public responses to her death, after which the monarch(y) was accused of being heartless.142 Her death fundamentally shifted the tabloid media's relationship with monarchy, after paparazzi were blamed for causing her fatal car crash in Paris. The Royal Editor of the London Evening Standard, Robert Jobson, said:

For the media [Diana's death] certainly changed the way reporting would be done around the royal family … It's certainly less free than when I started doing the job in the early ’90s, when really it was the media that saw the story, wrote the story, ran the agenda, and really were not controlled in any way 143

Jobson's description of increasingly curtailed freedoms in UK reporting of the monarchy reflects the changing codes of conduct for paparazzi since Diana's death, as well as unspoken yet taken-for-granted norms about royal privacy that have developed in discussions between the Buckingham Palace Communications Office and UK media outlets. In the weeks following Diana's death, the Newspaper Society 144 held a meeting of newspaper editors to address reporting and privacy, resulting in ‘the rules of press engagement [being] rewritten’.145 This included extending definitions of privacy to spaces ‘where people might have a reasonable expectation of privacy’, addressing privacy for young people and children, and introducing the notion of ‘persistent pursuit’ for paparazzi. The Firm’s attempts to protect the privacy of Diana's then-young sons also introduced new rules of engagement specifically for the royals. Known as ‘the pressure cooker agreement’, the Firm negotiated a deal where the paparazzi would leave William and Harry alone during their education, in return for intermittent occasions when ‘the valve would be released’ and they would be invited to staged photograph opportunities (for William's eighteenth birthday at Eton College, for example).146

The ‘pressure cooker agreement’ proved contentious for some newspaper editors, who protested against the restrictions when they often knew news stories about the young princes but were dissuaded from publishing them. In November 1998, for example, the Mirror published the headline ‘Harry's had an accident: but we're not allowed to tell you’, with the story claiming that ‘St James's Palace last night banned all newspapers from revealing what happened to Harry’ at school.147 The newspaper was asked by Buckingham Palace to apologise, to which it responded with another front-page headline ‘we're unable to apologise for a story we didn't publish’.148 In so doing, the Mirror lampooned the curtailing of press freedoms on royal news.

The Royal Rota System also manages media coverage of key royal events. This is a system where key journalists are invited to cover royal engagements (for example, a royal visit to a UK town) on the proviso they share their material with other journalists. Members of the Royal Rota include the Daily Mail, the Sun, The Times, the Telegraph, Wire Picture Agency, Independent Photographers Association, BBC, Sky News and ITV. The News Media Association says this was introduced ‘due to space restrictions and security’.149 However, it essentially means that the Firm can cultivate relationships with particular organisations, while banning direct access for others. This raises serious questions about journalistic integrity and democracy.

Paparazzi and tabloid exposure raise issues around the blurring line of royal/celebrity cultures. Because the royals are represented in media texts alongside celebrities, they are often categorised as such. Scholars and commentators have debated this.150 The sociologist Chris Rojek defines three ‘types’ of celebrity: achieved celebrity based upon talent (sports stars, actors); attributed celebrity manufactured by media representation (reality television stars); and ascribed celebrity stemming from inheritance and bloodline (royalty).151 Aristocrats and royalty were the ‘original celebrities’, dominating gossip columns in the early twentieth century.152 But celebrity in the era of reality television and online stardom (e.g. YouTubers) is increasingly positioned as a democratised, meritocratic space, offering power to ‘ordinary people’.153 In this context, to describe monarchy as ‘just’ celebrity is to simplify, and depoliticise, the monarchy's structural, constitutional and state privileges. As Tom Nairn writes, ‘the Queen and her family are never merely stars, or celebrities. They possess in addition a “secret” … an element of mystique whose glamour is in the end far greater than that of any media personality.’ 154 The scholars Heather Mendick, Kim Allen, Laura Harvey and Aisha Ahmed's work on young people's responses to celebrity, and Hannah Yelin and Michele Paule's work on young girls’ responses to female stars, has highlighted how royals are compared with celebrity figures.155 As Yelin and Paule write, although the girls they interviewed recognised royals as part of celebrity culture, they engaged critically with notions of royal celebrity to draw attention to inherited wealth.156 Monarchy must retain some elements of mystique, and the intimacy of celebrity cultures – particularly social media celebrity – challenges this.

Rather than simply describing monarchy as celebrity, then, some scholars discuss how the monarchy uses celebrity to appeal to new royal ‘publics’. In ‘Everyday Royal Celebrity’, for example, Nick Couldry argues that ‘royalty are exceptional by virtue of their position in both a social hierarchy and a media hierarchy’, where two ‘types’ of celebrity intersect but both produce royal representation.157 Likewise, Rosalind Brunt describes the investment of monarchy with ‘charisma’, a word used to describe the appeal of stars and celebrities but here drawing on mythologies of sovereign power.158 Again, we see here how the ‘magic’ of monarchy is being (re)produced in positioning monarchy as superior. There is no ‘context collapse’, because monarchy is not reduced to merely celebrity.159 In being represented as somehow ‘more than’, monarchy's superiority is brought into being ‘by virtue of being addressed’.160 Monarchy is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary.

The Firm 2.0: social media and participation

In the twenty-first century, ‘postnetwork, postpublic service media systems’ complicate how television is experienced as a communal activity, as there is typically no longer one television set in the family living area, but rather multiple platforms containing thousands of programmes.161 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. As Couldry and Hepp argue, in a global age ‘media events are certain situated, thickened centering performances of mediated communication’ which reach wide audiences through multiple platforms.162 Whilst television at the coronation brought monarchy into people's homes, the participatory qualities of digital media mean that the event is interwoven with the everyday lives of audiences.163 If Couldry argues that ‘liveness’ is key to the mediated centre, this is established using new forms in digital media culture.164 The shift from analogue to digital media poses new challenges, but also new affordances, for the Firm. This section describes, briefly, some of these changes.

Prince William and Kate Middleton's 2011 wedding was the first large-scale royal event staged in the digital age. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (keen to present William as the future Head of the Commonwealth) devised a communication plan for the wedding, specifically requesting ‘please use social media’ but including guidelines on how, illustrating again an embracement of new media but an attempt to control staging of the event.165 On the day, the event was watched live, worldwide, by two billion people on a multitude of channels and platforms, including the official ‘Royal Family’ YouTube channel, demonstrating a proliferation of broadcasts (each with different presenters, editing, formatting).166 YouTube announced ‘we've been working to make as much of the big day as possible accessible to everyone’, including – much like the coronation footage being flown to the USA and Canada, but digitised – having the footage publicly available after the live stream for those in different time zones.167

Direct participation was also encouraged. Facebook users could click an ‘I'm attending’ button to share their interest with others (and provide a staged sense of intimacy, as though watching on television was equal to physical attendance), the Twitter hashtag #rw2011 synthesised public commentary and an official YouTube ‘Wedding Book’ allowed users to submit congratulatory videos.168 Facebook estimated that ten million people worldwide mentioned the wedding in 24 hours.169 As the media scholar Espen Ytreberg argues in an analysis of Couldry's work, whilst the proliferation of media texts might appear to destabilise the ‘myth of the mediated centre’, actually multi-platform media forms enhance the sense of the event being pervasive.170 That is, the wider dissemination of the event makes the ‘mediated centre’ appear more legitimate, as it dominates more of our cultural experiences. No matter what platform we engage with, we will likely see the event.

At Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding in May 2018, digital media had expanded even further. Television remained a key platform with 18 million UK viewers for the ceremony, but television's globalisation meant that it was also watched live by 22 million US viewers, and the BBC commentary included a live link-up to the presenter Richard Bacon staged at a viewing party in Los Angeles, where Meghan was born, creating a ‘global’ event.171 The Firm's social media accounts released regular updates prior to the day, making wedding planning part of the public consumption of the event: for example, Twitter was used to announce William as Harry's best man.172 On the day, @theroyalfamily Instagram posted regular updates on their ‘stories’ feed, using the informal language of social media: ‘Today is Prince Harry and Ms Markle's Wedding Day!’ with a tagged location.173 This is a significant departure from the formalities and hierarchies of the coronation, illustrating the shifting media–monarchy relationship in new socio-political contexts. The use of new platforms suggests attempts to engage new demographics: teen audiences, for example, might be more likely to participate over social media than on ‘traditional’ channels.

In 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic gave the media monarchy new challenges. The Queen's motto, ‘I have to be seen to be believed’, was complicated by the virus being particularly dangerous for older people, meaning that she had to self-isolate for her safety.174 Royal engagements were cancelled, and crowds of people could not gather at royal events. Like many other UK businesses, the Firm moved online. Royals undertook engagements via the online video platform Zoom, including an appearance from William and Kate playing Bingo with residents in a Welsh nursing home.175 These events courted the boundaries of visibility/invisibility, ordinary/extraordinary. The royals were seen to be ‘working from home’ like millions of others around the world. The video backgrounds were interiors of royal palaces, with carefully curated framing: the Queen had a grander backdrop of luscious floral arrangements and chintz antique furniture, Kate and William a simpler (and ‘middle-class’) cream door, grey wall and single painting. Such concentrated footage of the Queen speaking to subjects is rarely seen, and her interactions with Princess Anne, seen explaining to the Queen how Zoom works, invested the appearances with an intimacy reminiscent of Royal Family; albeit more controlled considering it was on the Firm's terms.176 These Zoom appearances illustrated the importance of keeping monarchy visible, and how technology can be mobilised for the project of ‘seeing is believing’.

On one hand, much like television before it, the cultivation of official social media profiles gives the Firm more control. Instagram in particular facilitates images connoting intimacy because they are positioned as ‘direct’ contact with the monarchy, yet are actually carefully choreographed to depict precise meaning (more in Chapter 6). On the other hand, the social media scholars Alice Marwick and danah boyd undertake an analysis of celebrities’ use of social media using similar notions of ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’, arguing that a celebrity's identity is ‘traditionally … navigated with the help of assistants, public relations personnel, bodyguards, and other mechanisms that broker access between famous person and fan’.177 On social media, however, such infrastructure is not available, and fans have direct access while co-existing on the same platform: this is ‘context collapse’.178 This argument applies to the Firm; however, it takes on new imperative for a sovereign institution.179 How can monarchy maintain distance if its mediations abound on the same platform as its subjects’? How can the Firm be seen to represent the ‘centre’ if everyone has access to the same platform? This is an ongoing challenge for the Firm as it negotiates new media platforms.

Conclusion

In 2017, the Guardian released secret plans held by Buckingham Palace, the BBC and the government relating to the Queen's death.180 One anonymous television director told the journalist Sam Knight, ‘I have got in front of me an instruction book a couple of inches thick … everything in there is planned’.181 For many years, the BBC was informed of royal deaths first, but now an announcement will go to the Press Association and international media at the same time as a footman in mourning clothes pins a black-edged notice to the Buckingham Palace gates. News organisations will choose from 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 meticulously planned, down to the number of seconds the cortège takes to travel between locations. When the coffin reaches Westminster Abbey at exactly 11am, the country will observe a collective silence: railway stations will halt 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.

Staging a royal death is certainly not new. In 1936, George V's physician injected morphine to initiate the king's death after a long illness to ensure that it coincided with the print deadline for the next morning's papers, which were considered more respectable than the low-culture evening ones.182 But plans for the Queen's death encapsulate the precision of manufacturing spectacular royal events in a global, digital media age. Whilst, like twenty-first century royal weddings, social media mean that mediation cannot be entirely controlled, the plans demonstrate intent to inspire collective public feeling, as people's daily rituals are interrupted. This can be read as a strategic attempt to create what Couldry called a ‘centre’. As one of the Queen's courtiers told Knight, ‘it's history’, and it is precisely constructed to be.183 The story of the Queen's death is immediately positioned as more important than all others, and indeed more important than daily life itself. In the initial announcements, the BBC newsreader will begin ‘this is the BBC from London’, rallying a feeling of national emergency and national identity: this is an announcement from the state's centre, and the media provide access.

Negotiating sovereign power at the level of expanding and democratising media forms has posed significant challenges, where the balance of the paradoxical but co-dependent visibility and invisibility is continually under review. The film historian Jeffrey Richards argued that Bagehot's famous quotation ‘we must not let in daylight upon magic’ was written ‘before cinema, television and wireless transformed the world and made the letting in of light inevitable’.184 In fact, as I show, letting in some light is useful to facilitate public engagement with the Firm. Perhaps a more useful analysis of Bagehot's quotation is to ask how much light to let in. This is a dilemma negotiated throughout the Firm's history, and, as media forms continue expanding, will undoubtedly continue to be.

The monarchy needs the media more than the media need the monarchy. I opened this chapter with a quotation from the Queen: ‘I have to be seen to be believed’.185 Using the framework of British Cultural Studies wielded in this book, we might reformulate this quotation as: ‘I have to be seen to produce consent’. Indeed, individual royals must be represented as the Family Firm in order to produce consent for the Firm, and these narratives are fought for in media culture. The remaining chapters in Running the Family Firm explore representations of various royal figures to follow this logic.