The Prince and the Paupers

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch/Thomas Griffith

It took the splendor and pageantry of the royal wedding to match, and at last to overcome, the kind of coverage Britain was getting last week on American television. The anchorman heavies (Rather, Chancellor, Walters, Brokaw) arrived early to cover the preparations, but soon wearied of the familiar banalities --curbside interviews with the first people to stake out viewing spots, guardsmen shining their boots, the trafficking in gimcrack souvenirs. They had come to cover a spectacle but got themselves diverted by the earthier scent of real news. It was point and counterpoint all week.

Thus Britain's economic troubles, which except in moments of flare-up are usually buried in the financial pages, got an unexpected, and perhaps unwelcome, amount of prime-tune attention. To the camera's undiscriminating eye, action is action--and cars set afire by rioters in Liverpool (a sight beloved by television cameramen everywhere) vied on equal visual terms with royal fireworks in London; it was reminiscent of the way television juxtaposed street riots with the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968. On CBS, Dan Rather gave an unusually downbeat report on Britain's social unrest, high unemployment and general decline. All three networks interviewed Britons eloquent about problems. Enoch Powell was trotted out, the dour fellow who once warned of a parallel with the river Tiber running red with blood in ancient Rome if "colored" immigration in Britain was not reduced. A Scottish M.P., Willie Hamilton, who thinks the Crown an expensive anachronism and Princesses Margaret and Anne in particular to be parasites, got a long and polite hearing from Ted Koppel on ABC. Glimpses of cockney women cooing about Lady Di's charms were offset by skinheads as indifferent to the wedding as to anything else. ABC intermixed its prattle of gowns and rehearsals with pictures of grim unemployment lines in what it captioned "The Other Britain." Britain's other big story NBC'S Tom Brokaw, looking as preppie-eager as

George Bush, asked Richard Burton for an Englishman's view of monarchy and was told that Burton was Welsh and, coming from those aristocrats of labor, the miners, considered himself a left-wing socialist but was so disillusioned by all politics that he might even become a monarchist. There were such depths of irony in this answer that Brokaw prudently chose not to explore it further. The British, as listeners were constantly told, still like and look up to the monarchy. But the reporting conveyed a change in attitude since the last big royal wedding, of Elizabeth and Philip in 1947, as if royalty as the linchpin of British traditions was less central now that traditions themselves were under such challenge.

After days of crosscutting between sentiment and starkness, Frank Reynolds of ABC exactly caught television's about-to-change tone on the wedding eve by proclaiming, "It is now fairy-tale time," which would be a "respite from reality." And though the recorded voice of Vera Lynn was summoned up, singing There'll Always Be an England ("If England means as much to you/ As England means to me"), and though NBC'S John Hart took a smarmy look at Lady Di's old school to see how proper English girls got their special "edge," a casual television viewer might conclude that the wedding and perhaps royalty itself were magnificently irrelevant.

That was what the wedding morning coverage had to undo, and this it did.

The BBC's well-placed cameras, available to all networks, excelled in combining intimacy with spectacle. The result was less pointless darting around by cameras than usual. Gone also was another fixture of solemn English occasions, the reverent intonations of the late BBC commentator Richard Dimbleby, who whispered as if he might spoil someone's putt. It being morning-show time back in the States, the David Hartmans and Jane Pauleys, practiced in the smiling art of undemanding chatter, now reinforced the American journalistic hardhats in their vantage points along the parade route. Along with much inevitable pageant-babble, they provided useful notes of what was going on. Dan Rather, trying to sum it all up, decided that the Crown, like Britain, "endured," a view forgivably more optimistic at this moment than his earlier one. On television the eye saw youth, beauty, ceremony and enthusiastic crowds. The ear had been told of troubles hi this one brief moment known as Camelot. Together the eye and ear may have got it about right.

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