The Duke of Edinburgh's funeral on Saturday will be televised as minimally as possible by modern royal standards, reflecting his complicated relationship with broadcast media. Over eight decades, Prince Philip went from championing television coverage of the monarchy to shunning it, and his death itself prompted a backlash after the BBC cleared its schedules for extensive obituary coverage.
Philip's enthusiasm for television was evident in 1953 when, as chairman of the committee organising the Queen's coronation, he overruled Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. Both men argued that allowing cameras into Westminster Abbey would destroy the occasion's majesty. Philip, an early adopter of home movies, gambled that showing the royal family on screen would humanise and popularise the institution. The gamble paid off, leading to a surge in UK television set sales and the first royal ratings hit.
He continued to embrace the medium, presenting a 1957 science programme called The Restless Sphere, allowing the BBC's Man Alive to film him for The Duke Goes West in 1966, and introducing a television play about Admiral Nelson that same year. This positive experience likely made him more receptive when, in the late 1960s, the Queen's press secretary William Heseltine suggested inviting a documentary crew behind the scenes at Buckingham Palace and Balmoral.
The resulting film, Royal Family, was broadcast on 21 June 1969 and included scenes of the royals cooking a barbecue at Balmoral and the Queen buying Prince Edward an ice-cream. Despite criticism from figures such as David Attenborough, who warned that demystifying the monarchy could weaken it, the film was well received and broadcast five times, the last in 1977. The palace had shrewdly imposed crown copyright, and broadcast rights were later withdrawn, reportedly on Philip's insistence.
Only short clips have since been licensed for documentaries or exhibitions. While the precise reason for the ban remains unclear, biographers have speculated that Philip and palace advisers became alarmed by the way the film's existence was used to justify media intrusion during the intense coverage of Princess Diana and the Duchess of York in the 1980s and 1990s.
