Milestone as Queen's Speech marks 60 TV years

THE Queen's message to the Commonwealth on Christmas Day will mark a significant royal milestone. It was exactly 60 years ago that the BBC outside broadcast unit pulled up at Sandringham for the first time.
The Queen Elizabeth II in a gold lame dress recording her Christmas Day message to the Commonwealth in the Long Library at Sandringham in 1957.The Queen Elizabeth II in a gold lame dress recording her Christmas Day message to the Commonwealth in the Long Library at Sandringham in 1957.
The Queen Elizabeth II in a gold lame dress recording her Christmas Day message to the Commonwealth in the Long Library at Sandringham in 1957.

The crew might have confessed to nerves as they hauled the three Marconi MkIII TV cameras out of the van, but no-one was more worried than the star of the show.

The Queen had been speaking to the nation at Christmas since the beginning of her reign, five years earlier. But her 1957 message was the first to be televised – and since it predated video tape, it had to be delivered live.

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At exactly 3pm, viewers to both TV channels heard the National Anthem as the first camera panned across the sweeping Sandringham exterior and closed in on the window of the Long Library. Inside, the Queen, wearing pearls and a gown whose colour the audience could only guess, was seated at an antique desk, surrounded by cards.

Her seven-and-a-half minute “talk”, as it the papers called it, was written on a teleprompter and on notes at her side, but she had not entirely embraced the technology. She had agreed to a televised broadcast in response to criticism earlier in the year by Lord Altrincham, the writer John Grigg, in his journal, the National and English Review.

She acknowledged as much in her speech. “It is inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you,” she said.

The Queen went on to rebut his suggestion that the monarchy might seem outdated in the face of advancements such as TV.

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“It is not the new inventions which are the difficulty,” she said. “The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery. They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, honesty counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.”

The broadcast, a primitive, filmed “telerecording” of which survives, was itself an anniversary – 25 years since the first Royal address on radio by the Queen’s grandfather, George V.

Over the years, the 3pm speech has become a staple of the British Christmas, rivalled in the 1970s only by The Morecambe and Wise Show.

From the outset it has been screened simultaneously on all the main channels. ITV made the Queen its cover star on the Christmas edition of TV Times in 1957, and sandwiched her first broadcast respectfully between an hour of music from the light orchestral conductor Mantovani and a Merle Oberon film.

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The monarch is said to have taken a personal interest in each year’s speech, one of the few in which she expresses a personal view of world events, rather than speaking on Government advice.

She has often returned to the theme of changing technology, remarking in 1983 that “computers cannot generate compassion”.

However, her best-remembered speech, in which she referred to 1992 as her “annus horribilis”, was not delivered at Christmas but a month earlier, at London’s Guildhall during an event to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession.

That year, Prince Andrew and the Duchess of York had separated, Princess Anne had divorced, Prince Charles was revealed to have been conducting an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles, and Princess Diana’s unhappy life had been chronicled in a book.

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On top of all that, a fire had destroyed part of Windsor Castle.

The Queen chose not to mention any of that on Christmas Day, saying instead that the death that July of the war hero and philanthropist Leonard Cheshire “helped me put my own worries into perspective”.