It was clearly one of those you-had-to-be-there afternoons. You had to be by the Thames to get the full soaked-to-the-skin, can’t-see-a-thing frustration of the pageant as well as its but-I-wouldn’t-have-missed-it for-world payoff. But the BBC’s coverage produced a loyal facsimile of the same.
This was the state broadcaster deploying all its available “personalities” to keep up the nation’s spirits. Frequently they failed. But at the end, even as the picture froze and the microphones cut out during Land of Hope and Glory, the show managed to moisten our cheeks with salty water that was neither rain nor river.
“The little ships going past Westminster Palace — you have got to say ‘majestically’, haven’t you Tom?” queried Paul Dickenson, the sports commentator hired as the Richard Dimbleby of the day. “Without them there would have been no British Army,” replied Tom Cunliffe. As presenter of the documentary series Boats that Built Britain, he may be forgiven his hyperbole.
Others need not be let off so lightly. “Iconic” was the commentary team’s most overused cliché. Even the pods on the London Eye were iconic. Tower Bridge was “as iconic as it gets”. Tom and Paul’s homework showed. Waterloo Bridge was completed in 1944, “replacing John Rennie’s stone bridge that opened in 1817”.
Fascinating, but even more fascinating to know what was being semaphored from the Royal Festival Hall. “Tom, I think you can understand that,” said Paul “I haven’t got a clue,” replied Tom, but it was not “just waving flags about”.
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It was probably as complicated as mooring the Spirit of Chartwell herself, an operation that Tom made sound the equivalent of docking the lunar module Eagle to Columbia.
Out along the Thames were Anneka Rice talking up some amateur watercolour paintings, Ben Fogle rowing, John Sergeant in a nautical cap and Fearne Cotton in a white blouse fittingly decorated with dark clouds. Sian Williams was in the Tower Bridge control room talking bascules.
The rain increased its pelt, but Tom and Paul could not believe “how lucky we had been, really”. Nor could The One Show’s Matt Baker and News at One’s Sophie Raworth who were dry in a red, white and blue pod by Tower Bridge and adding very little except the occasional startled look when caught by a camera unawares.
Frequently they told us that the Queen was thoroughly “engaged” and enjoying every moment. Frequently we cut to her looking glum and sniffing. Still, the raindrops rolled majestically down the lenses.
At about 5.30pm, the BBC picked up a rumour that the “wow moment”, the flypast, had been cancelled. Instead fireworks let off from the iconic-as-it-got bridge added to the autumnal mist. But then, pixelating madly, the Royal Philharmonic’s drenched singers gave voice. And the cameras caught a queenly grin.