THE type of story which we tell of royalty is not the same as we tell of mere celebrities. We tend to be fascinated by the extravagances of the latter, but want, with regard to the former, to know about their ordinariness. Over the course of last weekend, the function of radio and television interviewers consisted primarily of cueing in the innumerable stories of the late Queen which we feel compelled to share. These are not stories of the magnificent, but of the mundane: Her Late Majesty doing a crossword puzzle, fixing a Land Rover, making tea.
It was in the ordinary interactions that Queen Elizabeth II made her presence felt: real and in person. Her Tudor predecessor and namesake knew also the importance of encountering her subjects in the flesh, which accounts for the number of stately homes that claim that Queen Elizabeth I slept in them. As the unflagging coverage from the World Service reminded us, this engagement was not restricted to these shores. From every corner of the globe came the common trope: how she lit up a room, eased a diplomatic row, or simply remembered somebody’s name. “The profound wisdom of always being well-briefed,” is how the Revd Richard Coles put it on Saturday Live (Radio 4).
If I had to select the best bouquets from the hundreds strewn throughout the weekend’s broadcasting, I would pick at least two from this programme: Terry Waite’s recalling his family stay at Balmoral shortly after his release, and the story of Maureen Nkandu, a Zambian journalist, who was inspired to pursue her career after an encounter when a 12-year-old with the Queen.
Newshour (World Service, Friday) yielded many exotic offerings, such as that of Henri, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, one of the many cousins of the late Queen, who patiently explained how the descendants of Queen Victoria had populated the courts of Europe. But Elizabeth was the one whom they all looked up to. In the heat of the moment, the foolhardy World Service presenter had a go at guessing who was now the new senior European royal; Louis XIV it is not.
On the Sunday programme (Radio 4), Professor Linda Woodhead contrasted the values of modern Britain with those with which the Queen was raised, and that she unflaggingly displayed. Based on her own wide-ranging studies of social attitudes, Professor Woodhead declared that “we have moved from a give-your-life ethic to a live-your-life ethic.”
And yet I wonder whether this is at least partly something to do with language; and that the reason that we are so drawn to those stories telling of small, mundane acts of thoughtfulness and charity is that they don’t seem to arise from some abstract concept of duty, but from basic human kindness. And that’s something that, were we able to be our best selves, we should all be able to manage.