Television
Two toadies
Alexander Chancellor
It is still mildly shocking to me that the BBC should not enjoy a monopoly of the coverage of major royal events. They are designed for the BBC, and the BBC for them. Yet Fanfare for Elizabeth, the con- cert which crowned the Queen's 60th birthday celebrations at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was an ITV 'ex- clusive'.
After watching it, I could see why. It was very much one's idea of an ITV rather than a BBC sort of programme (not that there is much difference between them nowadays). Indeed, it was a very American sort of programme. It could almost have been an Oscar awards ceremony. There were pic- tures of the Queen projected onto a screen at the back of the stage. There were actors — Paul Eddington and Judi Dench, to be precise — coming on and saying introduc- tory things to each piece of entertainment. The entertainment itself was generally dreadful — despite the participation of two excellent tenors, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras, presumably as a warm-up for King Juan Carlos of Spain who was arriving in Britain next day. And the show ended with Sir Geraint Evans, the ultimate sentimental Welsh ham, leading the chorus and the audience in a rendering of 'Happy Birthday to You'. It would have seemed perfectly natural if Miss Sarah Ferguson, looking almost brazenly confident in her strapless evening dress, had appeared on stage to receive some sort of prize.
But the real horror of the evening was Sir Alastair Burnet, whose reputation as a royal toady — sustained, to give ITV its due, by the excellent parodies of him on Spitting Image (Central, Sundays) — was established by his notorious television in- terview with the Prince and Princess of Wales. It is not just his tone of voice which offends (I have been asking friends to give me words to describe it, and the only offering I have received is that it resembles treacle being poured on to a velvet cushion). It is his seeming idleness. People in the old days used to mock Richard Dimbleby, but not only was his voice firm and dignified, he jolly well did his home- work. During those awful pauses, when nothing happens, that are an inevitable feature of all royal pageants, Dimbleby used to come up with lots of perfectly interesting and relevant information with which to cover the gaps.
When, last Monday night, the Queen's Covent Garden walk-about came to an unxplained halt — or rather, her Rolls Royce did — Sir Alastair's talk-about halted with it. The best he could do in a reference to the weather, was to refer to the 'raining' monarch. As the the car proceeded up Russell Street into Bow Street on its way to the opera house, Sir Alastair drivelled on about Johnson and Boswell and Wycherly and all the other completely irrelevant historical celebrities whom his researchers had identified for him as having some connection with the area. He even banged on about the ab- sence of barrows and costermongers in the now long-closed fruit and vegetable market.
And when, finally, the royal party entered the opera house, Sir Alastair appeared to know the names of only two of the dignitaries presented to the Queen. It was a pitiful performance. (The worst moment of all was, perhaps, when he informed the nation that he — `your commentator' — had once appeared in Bow Street Magistrates' Court and been fined £10. For what, we were not told, nor could we possibly have cared.) In comparison with all that, Spitting Image had a couple of good moments last Sunday. One was Eddie Shah seeing every- thing double because of the colour printing in his newspaper Today; the other was the band during the Trooping of the Colour striking up the 'Stars and Stripes' instead of the national anthem, with Mrs Thatcher, Reagan's toady over Libya, jostling for position with the Queen.
It must be said of the Queen, in this her 60th birthday week, that there is no form of humiliation from which she herself does not manage to emerge with her dignity intact.
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