First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 25th 2022

As most of you will be aware, the second Elizabethan era recently came to an end in the early part of September, and, for a lot of the time over the subsequent couple of weeks, television went into a kind of not exactly “limbo”, but very much shifted its attention to the life of the late Queen, and the public paraphernalia of the succession.

Now, I’m not a huge follower of Royalty “stuff” on the whole. I’ve spent a great deal of energy in refusing to engage with the various births, marriages, jubilees, and deaths that have happened during my adult life, so it might come as some surprise to you that we’re attempting to talk about that very subject in this week’s show.

But as that long and now finished reign happened to cover pretty much the entire history and growth of popular television in this country, with a lot of that popularity being triggered by the amount of sets that were bought just so the so-called “ordinary” people of the nation could view the Coronation in the comfort of their own homes via one of those new-fangled television things way back in 1953, and so much of the visual language of the past seventy years is tied up with the iconography of this particular reign, I thought it might be interesting to have a chat about the late Queen’s relationship with television as it unfolded both in the immediate aftermath of her passing, but also during those seventy years.

I always think that VISION ON SOUND works best when we take our subject of the week from something television-related, but then allow the conversation to head off in a completely different direction, so, rather happily, because LISA PARKER, one of our regular visitors to VISION ON SOUND has a much greater sense of history than I have, it was to her I turned, and I hope that, whether you are someone who engages with the notion of Royalty or not, you will at least enjoy what we found we had to say when recording this conversation about half way through what some people chose to refer to as that strange period of national mourning.

PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.