The BBC’s time-honoured chore will be to walk with kings — the Queen, actually — while not losing its common touch. Tomorrow it will bob alongside her royal flotilla then, on Monday, bop beside Her Majesty at the Jubilee concert. On Tuesday, however, it will have a rival courtier as ITV competes with its own coverage of the service of thanksgiving. It will do so the only way it now knows: by talking to crowds and hoping to keep its virtue.
“There is a default button that can get pressed on occasions like this, and I think sometimes is pressed too hastily,” says Phillip Schofield, who is co-presenting for ITV with Julie Etchingham. “What we did find with our coverage of the Royal Wedding last year is that those viewers who chose not to join us at first, if they hopped across they tended to stay with us, and that was gratifying. I am not saying either coverage is better or worse. It is just different and if you are both going to cover the same event it is probably best you do it a slightly different way.”
Schofield’s pairing for Prince William’s wedding with News at Ten’s Etchingham caused eyebrows to hop at the time. Yet it turned out just fine. Schofield, a former West End Joseph (as in Dreamcoat), brought showbiz to the party while Etchingham added a light-touch authority. ITV was, naturally, hammered in the ratings by three to one, but the BBC’s lead was cut as the day went on, with six million people watching the commercial channel.
Noticing that the BBC’s Huw Edwards had a tendency to seek historical guidance from Simon Schama, Peter Fincham, ITV’s director of television, ordered his station to keep its cameras fixed on the celebrities at Westminster Abbey. During Jerusalem ITV briefly switched to the crowds singing along in Hyde Park, a nice touch that the BBC did not think of.
By lunchtime, the crowds were tweeting Schofield asking him to kiss his co-presenter. To Etchingham’s surprise, he did.
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You will not meet a bigger monarchist than Schofield — Etchingham’s views, as a disinterested newscaster, remain unknown. What we can be certain of is that these upstarts will be having more fun than Edwards on BBC One. “I was incredibly nervous last time and the great thing about sitting next to Phil is that he has got performance written though him,” Etchingham says. With seven and a half hours on air to fill — an hour more than the BBC — a performance is going to be required.