AS THE Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury prepared last
weekend for their respective enthronements, and no doubt wondered
how they might achieve long-term leadership that garners
overwhelming approval from their followers, they could have done a
great deal worse than watch Our Queen (ITV, Sunday).
This was an essentially respectful, positive account of Her
Majesty's Diamond Jubilee and Olympics year; but, besides inspiring
affection for our Supreme Governor, it also offered some
unprecedented intimacies and carefully managed revelations. The
relation of monarch to PM; the closeness of the various members of
the royal family; the Queen's sense of mischief - this is perhaps
the best account that we have yet seen of all these widely
acknowledged realities.
It was good to see Church of Ireland and Roman Catholic
ministers enthusing about her symbolic power to heal divisions by
simply visiting their respective churches, and we heard that a
state banquet at Buckingham Palace could build political and
diplomatic bridges like nothing else.
It seemed to me that the Jubilee's capacity to build communal
fellowship and shared excitement, and the way in which it involved
a far wider social range of people than might be expected, was
glossed over too quickly last year by the media, who were desperate
to get on to the Olympics. This film gave, perhaps, a truer record
of public feeling.
The C of E is, of course, a branch of the Heritage industry; so
we might learn a great deal from BBC4's series Heritage: The
battle for Britain's past (Thursdays). I am finding this an
engrossing account of the wide public interest in our ancient
buildings. Not enough has been made of the paradox: the spread of
wealth caused by industrialisation and urbanisation created leisure
and education for mass appreciation of, and eagerness to visit, the
heritage that was being swept away by these very social
changes.
We heard how the 19th-century movement to protect, especially,
prehistoric threatened sites clashed with the immemorial British
right to private property. The tussle between the Government and
the fledgling National Trust over who should take over the great
country-houses that the aristocracy could no longer maintain was
particularly acute around the time of the Second World War, whose
mass destruction greatly quickened the sense that our physical
history must be cherished.
The appreciation of ruins was also shared by Pagans and
Pilgrims: Britain's holiest places (BBC4, Thursdays). Ifor ap
Glyn is an engaging guide to what I find a curiously mixed
documentary series. Just when his shallowness, his need to spell
out what anyone vaguely interested in the subject will know
already, and his mixing up of fantastical legend with hard
historical data make me want to switch off, he comes up with a
nugget of wisdom, or simply such personal commitment to trying to
understand the continuing attraction of these hallowed sites
(usually by immersing himself in freezing water) that I am
disarmed, and conclude that, after all, it is well worth sticking
with.