How things change in 30 years. When Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in July 1981, it was in many respects a bigger event than the wedding of their son, Prince William, to plain Ms Kate Middleton on Friday. A caveat needs to be entered here. In absolute terms, the television ratings for the wedding of 2011 may well have been higher. More cameras, a bigger contingent of journalists and news anchors descending upon London, merchandise doing brisk business: All of this was a given.
Yet the William-Kate wedding occupies a smaller quantum of the entertainment and leisure economy in 2011 than did the Charles-Diana wedding in respect to its contemporary economy in 1981. This is not just a reflection of Britain’s economic troubles. There is a recession in the country today but frankly 1981 was scarcely better. The 1970s were a nightmare decade for the British and Mrs Margaret Thatcher had been elected only two years before that 1981 wedding. She still hadn’t “put the Great back into Britain”; the Falklands War and the business turnaround were some distance away.
More than Britain, it is the response of global society to the William-Kate wedding that is telling. In 1981, Britain still mattered. Even if numbers and statistics and growth figures didn’t justify its importance, it retained a certain heft by virtue of its imperial history and its institutional legacy. To understand countries such as India, for instance, foreign offices in European capitals and Washington, DC, inevitably turned to Whitehall. Today they make their own judgements, form their own equations.
Likewise, society too seemed to take Britain’s establishment — its politicians, its cultural icons and of course its royalty — far more seriously in 1981. When he visited India a few months before his wedding, Prince Charles was treated as more or less a head of state. Every word he spoke was heard in sombre silence. On another note, Bollywood actress Padmini Kolhapure kissed him in public and set off a mini-controversy in a (then) less exhibitionist India.
What if Prince William had visited India this past winter? What if Bipasha Basu, to take a random name, had kissed him? It would probably have got the same coverage as, for example, a B-list Hollywood hunk turning up in India and declaring he loved Aishwarya Rai and she was the most beautiful woman in the world. More seriously, Prince Charles and Prince Andrew (and a host of minor royals) have come to India in recent years without anybody even noticing their presence.
What we are seeing is the diminution of the standing of Britain in not just India but many parts of the world, particularly its former colonies. However, there is a bigger phenomenon at work as well: The democratisation of celebrity. In an age of 24/7 television, of breathless and gasping celebrity-stalking journalism, and of media driving public opinion and fads, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish between sustained, lasting and well-deserved fame and simply the flavour of the week.
That’s why 30 years ago Prince Charles and Lady Diana were seen as part of a fairy-tale romance. Today, William and Kate are just another everyday ‘beautiful people’ story. The quantum of reportage may change but for some societies, some sections and some media markets, the wedding of the second-in-line to the British throne and the multicultural nuptials, some years ago, of model Liz Hurley and Indian-origin businessman Arun Nayar would be just as relevant.
Are William and Kate ever going to be as big a couple as Victoria and David Beckham or Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt? Thirty years ago, would we even dared have asked that question? Fame is no longer a function of memory. It’s a strange animal, one that requires Kate Middleton to compete with Katrina Kaif for the same space on Page 3.
If that is the broader context, there is a narrower one as well. It concerns the family Kate has just married into. Part of the reason for the contraction in the aura of British royalty has been simply its overexposure in the media and the public eye. Ironically, the blame (or credit) for this must go to Diana, Princess of Wales. As she moved from Shy Di, the teenaged girl — certified a virgin, as per palace protocol — who seemed so endearing when she got her husband’s full name all mixed up as they exchanged vows before a worldwide audience, to future queen and then to immediate past future queen, something seemed to happen to her.
Perhaps that is untrue. Very little happened to her; she remained just where she was. It’s the world that expected her to grow into a public role and grow up as a private person. She accomplished the first with aplomb but the second was a non-starter.
It is tempting to speculate what Diana would have turned out like were she still around. She would probably have become some sort of female Bill Clinton — strictly without the intellectual rigour — as an iconic rallying figure for the trendy Left, the limousine liberals if you like. She would possibly have been out on the streets, marching in protest against the war in Iraq. She would almost certainly have had an active presence on Twitter.
Diana’s fame proved fatal, literally some would say. As history’s most photographed royal, she was paradoxically also responsible for stripping British royalty of whatever mystique remained. The “People’s Princess” became the Commonplace Celebrity. For all their love for their mother, it has made her children wary of an over-the-top public profile, one where the media is used to target your enemies — remember Diana’s carefully scripted interviews on the state of her marriage, which admittedly followed Charles’ gratuitous public announcements about his infidelity — but ends up hounding you as well.
Other than in learning lessons from Diana’s life and tragedy, her son and daughter-in-law are also lucky in that the world will not obsess about them the way it did about the folks at Buckingham Palace a quarter-century ago.
This is the age of the lowest common denominator, not the highest common factor. It means man’s voyeuristic instinct can be served as easily by a footballer, his girlfriend and their out-of-wedlock child as by, some day in the future, Kate Middleton (or Princess Catherine as she should be correctly addressed) making the Prince of Wales a grandfather and giving the British their king for the mid-21st century.
As we said, how things change.
Source: The Pioneer
Yet the William-Kate wedding occupies a smaller quantum of the entertainment and leisure economy in 2011 than did the Charles-Diana wedding in respect to its contemporary economy in 1981. This is not just a reflection of Britain’s economic troubles. There is a recession in the country today but frankly 1981 was scarcely better. The 1970s were a nightmare decade for the British and Mrs Margaret Thatcher had been elected only two years before that 1981 wedding. She still hadn’t “put the Great back into Britain”; the Falklands War and the business turnaround were some distance away.
More than Britain, it is the response of global society to the William-Kate wedding that is telling. In 1981, Britain still mattered. Even if numbers and statistics and growth figures didn’t justify its importance, it retained a certain heft by virtue of its imperial history and its institutional legacy. To understand countries such as India, for instance, foreign offices in European capitals and Washington, DC, inevitably turned to Whitehall. Today they make their own judgements, form their own equations.
Likewise, society too seemed to take Britain’s establishment — its politicians, its cultural icons and of course its royalty — far more seriously in 1981. When he visited India a few months before his wedding, Prince Charles was treated as more or less a head of state. Every word he spoke was heard in sombre silence. On another note, Bollywood actress Padmini Kolhapure kissed him in public and set off a mini-controversy in a (then) less exhibitionist India.
What if Prince William had visited India this past winter? What if Bipasha Basu, to take a random name, had kissed him? It would probably have got the same coverage as, for example, a B-list Hollywood hunk turning up in India and declaring he loved Aishwarya Rai and she was the most beautiful woman in the world. More seriously, Prince Charles and Prince Andrew (and a host of minor royals) have come to India in recent years without anybody even noticing their presence.
What we are seeing is the diminution of the standing of Britain in not just India but many parts of the world, particularly its former colonies. However, there is a bigger phenomenon at work as well: The democratisation of celebrity. In an age of 24/7 television, of breathless and gasping celebrity-stalking journalism, and of media driving public opinion and fads, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish between sustained, lasting and well-deserved fame and simply the flavour of the week.
That’s why 30 years ago Prince Charles and Lady Diana were seen as part of a fairy-tale romance. Today, William and Kate are just another everyday ‘beautiful people’ story. The quantum of reportage may change but for some societies, some sections and some media markets, the wedding of the second-in-line to the British throne and the multicultural nuptials, some years ago, of model Liz Hurley and Indian-origin businessman Arun Nayar would be just as relevant.
Are William and Kate ever going to be as big a couple as Victoria and David Beckham or Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt? Thirty years ago, would we even dared have asked that question? Fame is no longer a function of memory. It’s a strange animal, one that requires Kate Middleton to compete with Katrina Kaif for the same space on Page 3.
If that is the broader context, there is a narrower one as well. It concerns the family Kate has just married into. Part of the reason for the contraction in the aura of British royalty has been simply its overexposure in the media and the public eye. Ironically, the blame (or credit) for this must go to Diana, Princess of Wales. As she moved from Shy Di, the teenaged girl — certified a virgin, as per palace protocol — who seemed so endearing when she got her husband’s full name all mixed up as they exchanged vows before a worldwide audience, to future queen and then to immediate past future queen, something seemed to happen to her.
Perhaps that is untrue. Very little happened to her; she remained just where she was. It’s the world that expected her to grow into a public role and grow up as a private person. She accomplished the first with aplomb but the second was a non-starter.
It is tempting to speculate what Diana would have turned out like were she still around. She would probably have become some sort of female Bill Clinton — strictly without the intellectual rigour — as an iconic rallying figure for the trendy Left, the limousine liberals if you like. She would possibly have been out on the streets, marching in protest against the war in Iraq. She would almost certainly have had an active presence on Twitter.
Diana’s fame proved fatal, literally some would say. As history’s most photographed royal, she was paradoxically also responsible for stripping British royalty of whatever mystique remained. The “People’s Princess” became the Commonplace Celebrity. For all their love for their mother, it has made her children wary of an over-the-top public profile, one where the media is used to target your enemies — remember Diana’s carefully scripted interviews on the state of her marriage, which admittedly followed Charles’ gratuitous public announcements about his infidelity — but ends up hounding you as well.
Other than in learning lessons from Diana’s life and tragedy, her son and daughter-in-law are also lucky in that the world will not obsess about them the way it did about the folks at Buckingham Palace a quarter-century ago.
This is the age of the lowest common denominator, not the highest common factor. It means man’s voyeuristic instinct can be served as easily by a footballer, his girlfriend and their out-of-wedlock child as by, some day in the future, Kate Middleton (or Princess Catherine as she should be correctly addressed) making the Prince of Wales a grandfather and giving the British their king for the mid-21st century.
As we said, how things change.
Source: The Pioneer
