Medals, funerals and the BBC

 Every Sunday, when I was growing up, our family had a routine. 

It started with no one else getting up. I would wander the house on my own and read books. Sometimes, in better weather I’d get on my bike and go for a ride before anyone was up. As I got older, my parents capitalised on this and left some money out for me to go and get the Sunday papers. We had the Observer (for a longer weekend read) and the Sunday Mirror. I was allowed to use the change to buy myself a chocolate bar and so my Bounty for breakfast treat was established early. The paper reading coincided with listening to The Archers Omnibus, while mum fiddled about in the kitchen making the Sunday roast. She would make pastry for an apple pie, stuffed with cloves, so that we could pretend to clean our teeth like Tudors and tell our fortunes. 

“When will I marry? This year, next year, sometime, never. Who will I marry? Tinker, tailor, soldier sailor. What will I be? Lady, baby, gypsy, queen. What will I wear? Silk, satin, rags, tags. On a, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Where will we live? Big house, little house, pigsty, barn.”

Then my parents would be sleepy, which I assume was to do with the red wine, and we’d all sit down to watch a black and white film that they would snore through. 

Then a new and exciting programme appeared, that we watched and mimicked, even though the idea of skiing was not even a distant thought to people of our class in the seventies/eighties. We did enjoy the crashes though. My parents would wake up soon after and we’d have something on toast and share a bar of Dairy Milk while we watched Songs of Praise and Points of View.

We loved ‘Pointless Views’, as my Dad called. We loved hearing the ridiculous things that people complained about and Barry Took was a comedy genius.

“Dear Aunty Beeb,

I was watching Songs of Praise when a trailer for the Norwegian drama came on and they showed the person who turned out to be the murderer. What were the BBC thinking?”

Barry Took would apologise, with his tongue in his cheek and a twinkle in his eye while complaining about the price of beer in Norway.

I never thought I’d ever be someone who considered writing one of those letters but yesterday, after my long walk, they repeated the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh  and I watched it. 

I quite like a funeral. I like the solemn ceremony. I like the hymns (it’s like Songs of Praise). I like society to acknowledge grief. This was a beautiful funeral. The music was absolutely amazing and Huw Edwards did an amazing job sitting outside Windsor Castle. However, I found the zooming in on the faces of the grieving family to be uncomfortable. I thought about the editors code not to intrude on grief and shock and really felt that it had been broken. I’m assuming that if you agree to it being filmed then you’ve given away that right. This is why Princess Ann is the cleverest Royal because the brim of her hat was wide enough so she couldn’t be seen. If you went to a funeral then you wouldn’t be able to see the family’s faces during the eulogy because you would be behind them. No one needs to be judged on how upset they look at this time. If these hadn’t been Covid times then the cameraman would have zoomed into the Prime Minister, great uncle Bertie thrice removed or the Sultan of Sumatra, which would have been ok. Instead we were forced to intrude on grief that should have been allowed to be private.

I mentioned it to the Long Suffering Husband but he was distracted by something else. 

He was obsessed with medals. Everyone seemed to have a lot of medals, even Edward.

“Edward was never military,” he said, “Where did he get all those medals from?”

He was frantically googling to get the answer.he concluded that he’d been given them by his mum. 

“That’s fair enough. A royal version of the star chart,” I said. “If you want a medal then I’ll make you an MBE.......Master of Bin Emptying.”

I won’t be writing to Points of View and signing off ‘Angry of Maldon,’ because I think that whatever they did then someone would have complained and none of it really matters. The funeral is a public moment of grief. The more difficult moments will lie ahead for the family, when everyone thinks you go back to normal but you don’t.