Britain's Television Queen by Bob Crew

Author:Bob Crew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: diamond jubilee, biography, diamond jubilee ebook, queen elizabeth II, queen of england, royal family, the royals, the queens diamond jubilee, 1950s, 50s, fifties, english, british, britain, uk, england, tv, television, history, winston churchill, reality tv
ISBN: 9781780921303
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Inventing the First Family Reality-TV Show

As we have seen thus far in this book, Queen Elizabeth II’s is a story of a queen who was light years ahead of her government and other royals where television was concerned at the outset of her reign 60 years ago.

This book not only tells readers about the fascinating history of television, but also about the equally fascinating and lesser-known involvement of Queen Elizabeth II in the promotion of television by royal association throughout her reign.

Close association.

One of the least recognised/most easily overlooked things about Queen Elizabeth’s television history is that she invented the first family reality-TV show in Britain, and also before the United States where there were no such shows previously.

She did this in a 1969 controversial BBC television film entitled Royal Family that was hailed as a sensation, because it was the first time that Buckingham Palace had opened its doors to the televisions cameras allowing them to televise Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip at home with their children, Prince Charles and Princess Anne.

Had she not opened the palace doors and allowed the cameras to film her and her family at home, the world’s first family reality-TV show would not have been invented with the words that she and her family spoke and the domestic actions that they took.

Because this was a posh reality-TV show with brass knobs on - and most people today think of reality-TV as being anything but posh, but quite often sleazy and vulgar - most people have not cottoned on to the fact that it was a reality-TV show for all that, a right royal reality-TV show!

It was intended as the prosaic reality of royals (if such a prosaic thing could possibly exist, as millions of TV viewers were dying to find out!), with royals speaking spontaneously and unscripted in their own home, re-inventing the queen as an ordinary mother just like all other mothers.

But how could she possibly be a plain and ordinary mother?

She couldn’t.

So there was an unintended element of fantasy here!

Following this television broadcast of Royal Family by the BBC, it appeared a week later on ITV, providing the British public with an unprecedented through the key-hole glimpse - a fly on the wall glimpse - of the private domestic world of the royals.

This was ground-breaking TV in the days before family reality-TV, which did not begin in Britain or the United until the 1970s.

Having sanctioned the televising of her coronation in 1953, Queen Elizabeth II had taken a quantum leap and moved on to invent, metaphorically speaking, the first reality-TV programme in Britain and ahead of the US, on the subject of a family at home in their natural habitat, and a royal family at that.

This was five years ahead of the first reality-TV show of an ordinary working-class British family in Reading, some 40 miles to the west of London, called The Family, also by the BBC.

Again we see how Queen Elizabeth II was ahead of the game in these television developments.

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