Video: From the arrivals, to the ceremony and the balcony kiss, here is a recap of all the key moments from the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. (April 29)
At great logistical expense and with far too much fawning from American anchors and their hired British commentators, an array of television networks nevertheless delivered — even a curmudgeon must admit — some sublimely beautiful, patiently reverent and refreshingly witty coverage of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding Friday morning. And so a new fire now burns in the bridezillas of tomorrow, who paused the DVR to make a note to selves: Get trees for inside the church!
Yuck, right?
Oh, you.
If you skipped the whole thing on principle and neverminded the bollocks and all that, then you truly missed out. You missed everyone — even E!, even Piers Morgan — being totally quiet for an hour and just basking in it. If you’re one of those people who got up early to tweet your disgust and royal-wedding indifference all morning, I will remember you next year, when the office Internet server crashes because you’ve been live-streaming basketball games during March Madness.
Here is what the royal wedding could teach us, and, no, it’s not about Pippa’s poise and angelic boys choirs and loop-de-loop Philip Treacy fascinators: It’s about how we will never achieve true multimedia peace until we learn to respect one another’s definition of hype.
As it happened, there were justifiable reasons for so many networks to be there, sending vast armies of journalists, support staffs and technical crews to London to cover the royal wedding — arguably at the expense of covering more worthy and pressing news. NBC’s Brian Williams all but made this point clear when he arrived in London on Thursday and flew straight home to focus instead on the rising death toll from this week’s spate of killer tornadoes.
Going in, I, too, might have wondered whether the feed from the BBC’s wall-to-wall coverage couldn’t somehow suffice for all viewers worldwide. Indeed, if the Beeb was your choice Friday morning — via BBC America or PBS stations — then jolly good. As we’ve seen on al-Jazeera during the Arab spring revolts and on NHK during the Japan disasters, American viewers with good cable access can cut through all sorts of clutter and distraction by clicking on native coverage.
But while surfing the entire channel grid from 3 a.m. until well after 9 (once the newlyweds traded those two chaste smooches on the Buckingham Palace balcony — “The money shot,” proclaimed “Today’s” Meredith Vieira), I was surprised to find that each channel covering the wedding — from the broadcast networks’ morning shows to Fox News to MSNBC to E! and TLC — was making a valid case for its right to be there. Each represented a niche of viewer back home.
What, after all, was TLC, the American purveyor of “What Not to Wear” and “Say Yes to the Dress” supposed to do? Skip it? (Say no to the dress?)
As sleepy Americans watched Kate-now-Catherine emerge in her Sarah Burton-designed gown, CNN had Vera Wang give it an immediate forensic evaluation, with not only approving discernment but also a whiff of defeat. There is simply no calculating the market value of what Burton’s achievement will mean to the bridal-industrial complex, Wang acknowledged: “There’s nothing that could be bigger. That’s a tad aggravating to me.” On ABC, the dress had given “Project Runway’s” Tim Gunn an ecstatic case of tied-tongue, while Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer beamed like grandmothers.
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