A pair of stamps issued by the Pacific nation of Niue with the image of Britain's Prince William and his fiancée Kate Middleton. Niue defended the "unusual" royal wedding stamps which raised eyebrows around the world by splitting Prince William from his bride-to-be. The stamps, approved by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and made by New Zealand Post, have a perforated line between the royal couple.
A royal wedding in the age of television is a mythic spectacle, a flowing, moving symbol of ritual and tradition
A royal wedding in the age of television is a mythic spectacle, a flowing, moving symbol of ritual and tradition. For one day in late April, as dawn comes up on London, the world of the Commonwealth will pause and immerse itself in pleasured distractions — to borrow a line from The Tudors — and partake in a historic love.If only for a moment, the world will be granted a respite from headlines of elections, a persistent economic malaise, civil strife in the Middle East, financial crisis in Europe and nuclear crisis in Japan.
Television has a way of magnifying an event. And not since July 29, 1981, and the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer has a wedding galvanized the popular imagination, as the April 29 wedding at Westminster Abbey between Prince William of Wales and Catherine "Kate" Middleton.
The royal wedding has the potential to be one of the pivotal moments of the television season, for rarely has a wedding stood at the centre of a culture and dominated the landscape the way William and Kate's has.
"The timing is perfect for a nice, week-long sorbet of sorts," Robert Thompson, pop-culture historian and media professor at New York's Syracuse University," told Postmedia News. "It clears the palate of all the other really frightening stories that are going on."
The royal wedding will be a balm, too, in that it promises a visual spectacle like few before it, with an almost mythical pomp and ceremony during the procession route from Buckingham Palace, Clarence House and St. James' Park to the Horse Guards Parade and, eventually, Westminster Abbey — a ritual of cathedrals, royal coaches and child bridesmaids.
But fairy-tale weddings don't always have a happy ending, even on television. The media culture is more cynical than it was in 1981, Thompson believes, and more casual onlookers may view the royal wedding much as they do The Bachelor.
"There was a real innocence that we brought to the Charles and Diana wedding," Thompson recalls. "She seemed so much in love, and young and pretty. We come to this next wedding having seen how that last one turned out.
"The way the fairy tale story of Charles and Diana ended, which was so sad and played out over such a long period of time, may in some way make people more shy and reticent to embrace this wedding the same way. There's a real cynicism this time, a sense of, 'Remember how that last one turned out.'
Television is a medium of relaxation and escapism, and royal weddings have an honoured place in many people's memories. Charles and Diana's wedding, dubbed "the wedding of the century," was watched by a global TV audience of 750 million viewers. The audience for William and Kate's wedding could conceivably be even greater: Some estimates have pegged the potential audience at 2 billion. CNN has dispatched a crew of more than 100 technicians to cover the ceremony; NBC will be on the air starting at 4 a.m. Eastern Time. CBC's coverage will be hosted by National anchor Peter Mansbridge; CTV will cover the ceremony with Lloyd Robertson and Lisa LaFlamme.
BBC World will air uninterrupted coverage direct from BBC One, and networks as far away as the Philippines will broadcast the event live.
The Eastern Time Zone is five hours behind U.K. Summer Time, which means the ceremony will unfold during the time usually reserved for network breakfast programs — traditionally one of the peak viewing periods of the day, as people are preparing for work.
And yet, the culture has changed significantly from that sunny day in 1981, when Charles and Diana's fairy tale wedding seemed to promise a happily-ever-after ending. And technology has changed with it. The ironic truth about television in the early 1980s is that, while the broadcast networks were producing some of the most groundbreaking, generation-defining programs in their history, the entire broadcasting picture was about to change. Three of the most defining names in broadcasting — MuchMusic, CBC Newsworld and TSN, and their U.S. equivalents, MTV, CNN and ESPN — would usher in a new age of 500 channels, and a cable universe where viewers can pick and choose their programs based purely on individual taste.
For every viewer impassioned, moved and enchanted by the royal wedding, there will be other viewers with other interests on their minds. The royal wedding will reach a significant, possibly record-breaking, audience, but unlike in 1981, that audience won't be watching the same broadcast on two or three different channels. In today's electronic age of instant communication, there's a veritable blizzard of choices and options. The audience will be large, even though many may choose not to watch, but that audience will be scattered across hundreds, possibly thousands of different platforms.
The 1981 wedding of Charles and Diana unfolded little more than a year after the U.S. Olympic hockey team's Miracle on Ice, a year after the debut of ABC's Nightline with Ted Koppel, little more than a year after the debut of CNN in June 1980, and just two days — two days! — before the birth of MTV.
Those with a sense of history will remember, too, that it was little more than 16 years later, on Sept. 6, 1997, that many of those same viewers who witnessed the royal wedding on TV watched Elton John, clad in a subdued dark suit, perform a revamped version of his 1973 Marilyn Monroe homage Candle in the Wind at the funeral of his late friend, Princess Diana, at London's Westminster Abbey — the very same venue that will host the royal wedding of William and Kate.
That broadcast was watched by an estimated worldwide audience of 2.5 billion, more than twice the number of people who watched Charles and Diana's original royal wedding.
"I still remember the kind of naivete and innocence with which we watched that first wedding," Thompson says. "That one was very moving — that big dress that went all the way down the steps, and all the ceremony.
"Now, though, I think it's going to be very difficult to look to this royal wedding and not feel the still powerful echoes of the last one, and the full story of what happened. There's this almost inescapable feeling this time that, if you want a Cinderella story, you'd better watch Cinderella."
The royal wedding will still be a major television event, though, one of those few — and increasingly infrequent — occasions when the mass medium known for fragmenting families draws a mass audience to a single, moving event. It's just that, this time, we won't all be watching on the same channel.
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