Weddingballs

Caption suggestions gratefully accepted... 

Much of the British media's coverage of the Royal Wedding was a textbook exercise in the sublime elevation of banality to rarified pseudo-profundity.

It was just a wedding people! And whether they’re ‘Big Fat Gypsy’ or Royal, they all follow roughly the same protocols of dullness and sentimentality.

Of course the real difference between a Gypsy and a Royal Wedding is that Wills and Kate were far less likely to have their reception cancelled the day before. Hell, the Royals even rocked up at the Abbey in a fleet of vans for this hitching.

In the weeks running up to this yawnfest, you'd be forgiven for thinking that obsequiousness was a national pastime, given lurid expression every time one of these balding aristocrats has a bunfight they want financed by the taxpayers.

Sphincter-tingling...

But it’s not even the way Britain  makes a virtue of outrageous class snobbery that rankled; live here for a while and you learn to expect that kind of foolishness. It was the behaviour of the ‘Fourth Estate' that was most distasteful; it was the way that shameless hacks fell over themselves in a gallop for the honours list with their rectum-scouring paeans to monarchism.

If they weren't so clearly overgroomed, underworked and overpaid, one might almost have felt sorry for the TV commentators who had literally hours of dead air to fill with slim pickings on Celeb-watch and who were consequently reduced to pretending to be excited about spotting Posh and Becks or Elton John and his partner.

A high point (or existential trough of despondency) occurred when it transpired that David Beckham had apparently put his OBE trinket on the wrong lapel! This gave grateful commentators something to talk about other than his wife’s Christian Louboutin heels; fascinating. And then there was Ben Fogle! Was this the wedding of a 'posh' C-lister to a footballer or something?

But the endless witterings of TV 'experts' float off quickly into the ether and are soon replaced by more verbal guff. The response of the printed and online media was more nauseating because you knew that ostensibly intelligent people sat down and actually wrote this doggerel. They may even have read it back to themselves approvingly before filing it.

Toadies

“WHAT a day,” gushed Patrick Jephson in a piece for The Daily Telegraph and also run by that other organ of toadying Loyalism, The Irish Independent. “To see and hear William and Catherine take their vows was a privilege made no less special by sharing it with an extended congregation of a billion or so. As a wedding production, this one surely scored as high marks for technical merit and artistic interpretation as any in Westminster Abbey's history.”

Just so you know; Patrick Jephson was equerry and private secretary to Diana, Princess of Wales, from 1988 to 1996.

And then there was The Daily Mail which can always be depended on for the grand occasion and a right Royal Rimming. Quentin Letts reminded us of his psychic hotline to Mrs Windsor’s inner most thoughts: “Did you see William and his bride stop and bow before the Monarch at the end of the wedding? The Queen gave the tiniest nod of approval. A sort of ‘yep, you two will do just nicely’. High praise from an old pro.”

A.N. Wilson also of that venerable organ The Daily Mail (and I use the term ‘organ’ advisedly) dubbed the wedding ‘a political revolution’. “After today,” he told us yesterday, “it will no longer be possible for republicans to say with quite so certain a tone that the monarchical system shuts out the under-privileged.”

Superior Royals?

Charles Moore, again in The Daily Telegraph, informed us that “there are other royal weddings – in Spain, or Sweden, or Swaziland – and I am sure they are very nice. But they do not stand for anything much in the eyes of the world. They don’t attract messages of support from the crew in the International Space Station – a particularly surreal touch in yesterday’s reports. They don’t echo in the imagination of humanity. Our one does.”

Moore continues to crow, first belittling the rituals of Republic and then the Catholic Church before reaching again for his Union Flag: “The French can do splendid parades which express the nation’s high sense of itself. The Americans in their presidential inauguration – especially in that of Barack Obama – find a simple, but impressive way of reaffirming the principles of their constitution. The Catholic Church, when installing (though sadly, no longer crowning) a new pope, offers a ceremony which brings home the power, the loneliness and the humility of that extraordinary position. But nothing else anywhere has the archetypal quality of what was shown in Westminster Abbey, the same closeness between what is unspeakably grand and what is ordinarily human.”

New depths of shallowness...

For sheer fawning vapidness however, which seems to be some sort of perverse competition among Mail hacks, Jan Moir wins hands down. “On her day of days, Kate wore her gorgeous chocolate hair in a half-chignon, with make-up she had applied herself. She looked peachy-lipped and beautiful, despite the slightly ageing effect of so much of her favourite kohl and rusty blusher.”

OK, so I’m sure there’s some public interest there, at least for the more bitchy and empty-headed sections of an increasingly vacuous culture. That’s fine, but when Ms Moir wanders into wondering about the philosophical symbolism of this young woman’s cosmetic regime, she is on far less certain ground.

Quack quack

But on she squawks regardless: “Yet this determination to be herself, to do it her way, is what will stand her in good stead. One can understand the impulse to have a little bit of control on a day that changed her life. From now and for ever more, the security blanket of at least being in charge of her own mascara is all that stands between Kate and the scrutiny of the world.”

Jesus wept. Somebody paid good money for that too.