In all the wall-to-wall, 24/7 wraparound coverage, there was one telling detail. The problem with being royal, said Prince Philip, was that people assigned you a caricature. Once the caricature had been set, there was simply nothing you could do about it: you were a victim of your own “spontaneity” or “formidable intelligence”, or whatever the newscasters decided to call your mistakes. Looking back over his many appearances, however, including footage of him screaming “NO, you idiot” at a horse, you wondered: well, how hard did the duke try to alter the picture? Not very bloody much. He knew, and we knew, that it made great television, the clever, wry old dog.
What a wealth of telling footage there is of what ITV’s royal correspondent Chris Ship bizarrely called “this country’s longest-ever consort”. You might imagine he was the prince of science or technology, but the single greatest innovation Philip brought to the royal family was the television. To watch the prince himself was a revelation: you find yourself hanging on for the fruity aside, the cocked eyebrow, the bloodhound’s nose sniffing the air for the prettiest presenter.
Philip wasn’t comfortable on television: he was too pragmatic, rude and dry — it seems amazing now that he was ever let anywhere near, for example, Wogan.
But when it worked: what sheer magic. Again and again we saw the glittering footage of the coronation. What must people at the outer reaches of the Commonwealth have thought of that alien orgy of jewels and robes? Televising it was his idea, and he oversaw it. It was a masterstroke of modernity and foresight.
But television, handled badly or overused, can also diminish things, turn meaningful moments into plastic non-events. It was this that we witnessed for hours and hours and hours on Friday. Just why? How he’d have hated the endless flannel and padding the BBC strapped on at the stroke of the news.
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By mid-evening, Sophie Raworth was struggling to control the waves of genuflecting guests being hectically rotated onto the set in their regulation mourning gear — I mean, were they even sad? “It’s been about nine hours since the announcement,” she said, wanly, just after a package with someone who remembered serving on Britannia and how “we’d started a beard-growing competition”. A beard-growing competition? Well, yes. That is exactly what it felt like watching endless men in uniform claiming “what he actually loved was the RAF”.
What was the point of it? Arse-covering mostly: the only reason I can think of to snap off BBC4 entirely was the worry they might be criticised for not snapping it off and showing some entirely inoffensive programme on, I don’t know, the history of jazz. It says everything about our relationship with the royals and television that 27,000 viewers still watched the channel’s black screen.
It was more entertaining, after all, than watching Gyles Brandreth telling us there were “rooms he wasn’t allowed to go into, boxes he couldn’t open”, when Philip arrived at Buckingham Palace.
On the BBC the Archbishop of Canterbury revealed the prince had “a really extraordinarily prophetic gift”. Genuinely? You had to turn over to Channel 4, of all places, for any kind of questioning or deeper analysis: there we alighted on the disgruntled visage of Jon Snow — the Prince Philip of Primrose Hill.
It was almost worth it to watch him have to conduct an interview, curtains drawn, with the Queen’s former press secretary Charles Anson, who, equally reluctant to be there, claimed there was “no reaction whatsoever” from the Chinese over the duke’s “slitty eyes” comment.
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There was Krishnan Guru-Murthy broadcasting from New York, where his sole brief was to remind us how little the Americans care about the royal family. Sure they don’t, Krishnan — unless you count their television event of the year. Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan and Prince Harry, with its triviality, its oversharing, its selfishness and narcissism, was the opposite of everything it meant to be Philip.
Over on ITV there was a threadbare offering. It just showed that at times like this it simply did not pay to be the Meghan channel. Not a single royal apart from Princess Anne appeared on the coverage I saw. Tom Bradby, normally so spry and confident, trudged through a script of jarring jauntiness. Philip had married “the world’s most famous woman”. We were encouraged to “pick your epithet” to describe the duke. “While his wife wore the crown, he wore the trousers”, said another correspondent. What was this, the Daily Star?
If you wanted to know what Philip’s legacy was, you only needed to watch the BBC’s main tribute. This was a ponderous and lispingly reverential programme narrated by Andrew Marr. Most remarkable were the appearances of all four of his children in mourning gear, speaking about their father in the past tense, in front of funereal pictures, for interviews that must have been recorded when he was alive and well. Talking about a member of your family as if he was dead feels monstrously strange. But it is also exactly the sort of selfless, dutiful getting on with the job that Philip would have admired.
