Last weekend I watched Stephen Frears' film “The Queen”, for which Helen Mirren justifiably won an oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II. As it was intended to do, the film brought back vivid memories, not just of that Sunday morning, ten years ago at the end of August, when we woke up to discover that the Princess of Wales had been killed, but also of the exceptional week that followed, when a great wave of grief and mourning swept over the nation. Of course, the saturation coverage of her death on the BBC was only to be expected, but many people soon got tired of that and by the Sunday evening audience figures had already dwindled to a fraction of their normal size, as viewers turned over in droves to ITV. What took many of us by surprise was the huge banks of flowers which soon built up outside Harrods, Buckingham Palace, Althorpe and Balmoral, and the long queues of people who went to sign books of condolence, not only in London but all over the country and in other...
A blog by a Methodist minister in the UK