Once Upon A Wedding
An hour or so after two billion people, none of whom I know, happily endured an endless royal wedding broadcast, I made myself a cup of tea and decided to wait for the return of the British sense of humour.
A typical offspring of Russian intelligentsia, I am a born and bread anglophile, brought up on Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, not to mention the collected works of Mine Reed, a British writer who seems to only be read in Cyrillic (The Headless Horseman, anyone?) From Wilkie Collins to Rudyard Kipling, from Conan Doyle to Lewis Carroll, my childhood’s bookshelves careened under the weight of hefty tomes, all telling stories of a far off land that was, most certainly, the centre of the universe. There was a swing in my grandpa’s dacha, where I would sit for hours composing yet another novel – they all began at the Tower of London which I assumed was the only acceptable backdrop for a self-respecting story.
And so the royal wedding left me puzzled, for it combined something that still fascinates me– British Royal history – with something I abhor – British reality TV – in one hopelessly dull broadcast that could have been entitled “Who Wants to Be A Royal?” or “The Duchess Academy”. I half- expected the event coverage to have a tinge of Monty Python, yet the only somewhat funny commentary on the BBC came from a couple of tipsy girls dressed in Union Jack dresses, who told the interviewer that now that they have seen the wedding procession they were going to SoHo “to find the real Queen”. Thank God for the live feed, for I am afraid even this comment would have been cut by the zealous producers who were much too keen to give their broadcast a sense of solemn purity so clearly at odds with the media-grabbing nature of the whole business.
I suppose one does not preserve the Monarchy by making fun of it. Still the flow of never-ending accolades and the helicopter shots of the mob swarming the Palace gates to get a glimpse of a royal kiss reminded me more of the May day demonstrations on the Red Square than of Shakespeare’s homeland, where someone at least should have had something witty to say.
While the tabloids have certainly done their share of blowing the event out of proportion, what puzzled me most was the way reputable news networks – BBC, CNN, France 24 – became obsessed with the Royal Wedding, making it a news subject for weeks on end. And then I saw a Nielsen report which made things perfectly clear: the TV industry needed this event even more than the British Monarchy did, though pretty much for the same reasons. It is fighting for survival.
The report in question, released around the time of the wedding, confirmed the fear that has been creeping upon us for quite some time now: there are fewer Americans who own a TV set today today than in 1991. It is unlikely that this trend will reverse itself, and it is likely that the rest of the world will follow. Analysts cite many reasons for the decline, but one thing is clear: TV is no longer the only option for the younger generation. Other screens and on-demand services are replacing the linear broadcast. A magic box that for so many years was considered the “fireplace” of your average household is fading away, and with it the unity of the household itself for suddenly we all want to watch something different.
You might argue that the supposed 2 billion eye-balls who did watch TV on April 29 prove me wrong. Yet to me this day was a perfect argument for following the event online. While the TV coverage brought us a boring one-sided point of view, the online world gave us so many things to smile about, from the made in China celebration mugs where Prince William was accidentally replaced by his brother, to the hilarious search statistics ( Yahoo reported an over 1200% surge in search for “What is Prince William’s last name”. ) And if you find most royal wedding jokes too crass to enjoy, you can always stumble on a random Oscar Wilde quote, giving us the sparkle we expect from the British wit : “Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.” Give me a commentary like this and I might consider keeping my TV set.
