Friday, July 29, 2011

30th wedding anniversary of Prince Charles and Lady Di

The Liverpool Echo tells us tonight that it will carry a big feature tomorrow remembering the 30th anniversary of the Royal Wedding where Prince Charles married Diana Spencer. (And no doubt they will not be alone in this, we can expect this from lots of newspapers tomorrow I am sure, I am not especially singling them out).

Am I alone in finding this hideously distasteful?

There is so much wrong with this. For one thing the marriage was not a success and ended in divorce, secondly the bride died in difficult circumstances 14 years ago, thirdly the groom has since remarried and fourthly their elder son celebrated his own wedding only a few months ago.

Are we so devoid of news items that an article about how we remember celebrating this event is worthy of coverage?

Consider this, it is 25 years since I was married,  the marriage was not a success and ended in divorce, secondly the groom died in difficult circumstances 15 years ago. And although I have not remarried and we did not have any children, I would be simply horrified if any newspaper chose to remind the world of our wedding anniversary and ask how people remembered celebrating it at the time. Of course they wont because we weren't famous and most of the guests will have long forgotten the entire event anyway and nobody would be remotely interested, but that is only because we were neither famous nor royal. But the point still stands, it would be staggeringly inappropriate and I would be very upset.

For what it is worth, as a confirmed Republican even then, I studiously ignored the Royal wedding, despite being an unwitting visitor to London at the time when it was all happening. However, I still have compassion for the Prince of Wales and his sons, second wife and wider family, and I think this is very wrong.

Incidentally the couple were married on 29th July 1981 which is today, not tomorrow so I have to presume that the coverage is timed for tomorrow because, particularly during Parliamentary Recess and outside of the Football season, there is very little else to write about. This does the already damaged image of our fourth estate no favours.


Photo from http://funees.com/funny-creative-divorce-cakes.html

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

its called Lazy Journalism , Louise, Youre right in saying that papers struggle for stories in the summer as so many folk are now on holiday, schools , Parliament etc, so theres no easy fillers as they call them to just pop into columns, This is a raid on archives -very easily done and pretty quick to do -

Not only lazy but shows up the paucity of the quality in todays journalists that someone must have suggested this-