A
y
e niv rsar n
TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2011
Years
lifestyle
Britain’s royals, once rulers, are now celebrities P oor Kate Middleton. She’s not just marrying a future king. She’s marrying all of us.Once upon a time, British subjects gazed upon their sovereigns from afar. Not any more. Members of the royal family are now Hollywood-style mega-celebrities , their cellulite, receding hairlines and boozy nights out subject to the same relentless scrutiny as other A-listers. The monarchy has gained in star power, and perhaps lost in dignity, since William’s mother, Princess Diana, burst into the royal family in a blonde blaze of charisma and changed it forever. On British newsstands ahead of Friday’s wedding, Kate and William beam from the covers of celebrity magazines alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones, singer Cheryl Cole and surgically altered glamour model Katie Price. One promises the inside scoop on “Royal Wedding Meltdowns!” Another says that “Pals Fear for Skinny Kate.” The royal couple is even on the cover of TV Times , the wedding will be the television event of the year. It’s easy to forget that it was not always like this.
“When I was growing up I thought the royal family was harmless but a bit boring,” said novelist Monica Ali, whose new book, “Untold Story,” imagines an alternate future for Princess Diana. “It was really when Diana came on the scene that things started to change,” Ali said. “She divided opinion. A lot of people adored her, some people didn’t like her, but everybody had an opinion about her. “She brought celebrity into it , for good or for ill.” “Untold Story,” out now in Britain and published in the United States in June, imagines that Diana didn’t die in a 1997 car crash, but faked her own death, changed her name and rebuilt her life in a small American town. Ali, whose books include the best-selling London immigrant saga “Brick Lane,” uses the novel to muse on the price of celebrity and the pressures of fame. “Kate is not just marrying into the royal family,” Ali said. “She is marrying into celebrity. She is entering the game show of the first wives’ club. She’ll be competing with Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni.” There’s nothing new in a popular desire
to read about celebrities, but over the decades our relationship with them has been transformed. Perhaps it was the rise of the paparazzi, with their long lenses and lack of boundaries. Maybe it was the lowering of social barriers and inhibitions that began in the 1960s. Nowadays, we want to know everything. Ellis Cashmore, a cultural studies professor at England’s Staffordshire University and author of the book “Celebrity Culture,” said Princess Diana was a key figure in this transition , and so, even earlier, was the late Elizabeth Taylor, with her emotional exuberance and health problems and turbulent love life. “It wasn’t the Liz Taylor we saw in the movies we were interested in , we wanted to know the real person,” he said. “We became much more interested in people’s private lives , or what was once their private lives.” The royal family remained largely off-limits , until Diana worked her fairy-tale magic. The romantic 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and 20-year-old Lady Diana Spencer was followed by two sons, William and Harry. Then came
bulimia, a suicide attempt and marital discord that was obvious to the world even before Diana told a TV interviewer in 1995 that “there were three of us” in the marriage , Diana, Charles and his paramour Camilla ParkerBowles. Throughout it all, paparazzi trailed Diana wherever she went. Her combination of glamour, personal warmth, charity work and unhappiness was gold dust. “The humanizing touch Diana gave it was like a magic touch, a wand , the entire royal family became in one instant human,” Cashmore said. “It was as if it had dawned on us that they were ordinary people just like us.” And that changed the royal family. “Diana jolted them into understanding they weren’t a private institution at all,” Cashmore said. “They were public, and we , the consumers, the fans , felt a sense of entitlement. It’s not just a monarchy. It’s our monarchy. “The royal family has had to come to the recognition , slowly and rather reluctantly , that they are public property.” That reluctance , and recognition , was dramatized in “The Queen,” Stephen Frears’ film about the aftermath of Diana’s death, in which the attention-shy monarch played by Helen Mirren is galvanized into a public display of grief by populist Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the years since Diana’s death, the palace has made increasing concessions to popular hunger, including carefully staged interviews and photo opportunities with the young princes, William and Harry. Royal officials have media-managed the wedding preparations with skill, releasing a steady drip feed of details, setting up a website, YouTube channel and Twitter account and arranging to stream the wedding ceremony live on the Internet. It is all designed to satisfy huge public curiosity while maintaining some control over the disclosures. Most people in Britain express nothing but goodwill for William and Kate , and many sympathize with the nervousness Middleton must feel about becoming public property. “I do think there’s a boundary,” said 23-yearold London trader Leah Clarke. “Every person is human and entitled to their privacy and that’s a right to everyone whether you’re a royal, a celebrity or whatever.” Perhaps Kate and William will be allowed their fairy-tale ending , or at least a normal existence. Ali hopes so. “There is a very human part of us that longs for more drama,” she said, “but we would like the fairy tale to work out this time around.”— AP
A commemorative plate for Diana, Princess of Wales is pictured with a souvenir plate for the royal wedding of Britain’s Prince William and Kate Middleton on a market stall, in London yesterday.—AFP
Shower us with donations:
William and Kate
W
hat do you give the couple who have everything? The answer, in the case of Prince William and Kate Middleton, is a donation to charity. Not for them the entire roomful of antique furniture including a four-poster bed in maple which Canada gave to William’s mother Diana and Prince Charles for their wedding in 1981. Or the 20 silver platters inscribed with the date of the marriage which was Australia’s gift 30 years ago. In a different age, the second-in-line to the throne and his fiancee have asked anyone wanting to give them a present to pay into a fund to support 26 charities, many of which are not particularly well known. They clearly want to spread the charitable giving around the Commonwealth because one is the appeal for aid following the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, last month which killed more than 200 people. The Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary and Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service are also on the list of beneficiaries. Yet most of the charities are in Britain and some reflect the prince’s military background. A handful of them help service personnel and their families, such as the Army Widows’ Association. Donations to www.royalweddingcharityfund.org can be made in six currencies. The money will be held and distributed by a charitable foundation set up by William and his brother, Prince Harry. William proposed to Kate while on holiday in Kenya, and the prince’s affinity for causes in Africa is reflected by his choice of conservation projects run by the Zoological Society of London to save the black rhino and African elephant from extinction. The couple have also decided to support Beatbullying, a children’s charity which says it is “working with young people to create a world where bullying, violence and harassment are unacceptable”. But there will still be a few presents for Kate and William to unwrap. The people of Wales will give them a speciallydesigned piece of Welsh crystal. The couple have lived for the past two years in Anglesey in north Wales where the prince is an RAF helicopter pilot. Wales’ First Minister Carwyn Jones said: “The happy couple have strong links with the country and this is where they have chosen to make their home. “I wish the royal couple all the very best for their big day, and every happiness for the rest of their lives together.” More unusually, a South African discount airline has made a tongue-in-cheek offer to give Kate Middleton’s family a herd of cows, an African tradition known as “lobola”. Lobola, a southern African wedding custom, requires the groom to make a symbolic payment to the family of the bride, traditionally in cattle. The airline, kulula.com, said it would source a herd of cows locally in Britain and deliver them to the couple-providing Middleton’s family, who have made millions from a party goods business, accepts. The Canadian government, which has a history of giving generous wedding gifts to British royals, will not announce its gift until the wedding day. But as its present to the couple, the Canadian province of Alberta has already made a donation of 25,000 Canadian dollars ($26,200 US, 18,000 euros) to seven shelters for young homeless people. — AFP
Pre-wedding poll shows support for royals A
s preparations step up for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, an opinion poll yesterday showed two-thirds of British people believe the country is better off because of the royal family. However, only 37 percent said they were “genuinely interested and excited” by Friday’s nuptials. In bright sunshine, thousands of tourists in London took advantage of the Easter Monday holiday to flock to Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace to see the two focal points of the wedding. The prospect of the wedding appears to have given a boost to the royal family’s popularity, with 63 percent of those questioned in the ICM survey for The Guardian saying Britain would be worse off without the monarchy. And three-quarters of the 1,003 adults questioned believe the royal wedding will give the country “a strong feel good factor”, although only one third of respondents said they were “genuinely interested and excited” by the marriage. With hundreds of thousands of people expected to line the wedding route, forecasters said days of unseasonably hot weather could give way to cloudier and cooler weather, meaning the wedding could be hit by showers. “At the moment, it is looking like temperatures will probably be a little bit above average and there is a risk of heavy showers,” said Helen Rossington, senior forecaster at MeteoGroup. The couple’s low-key preparations for the big day continued as William had Sunday lunch at the home of Kate’s parents in the village of Bucklebury, southeast England, reports said, while the rest of the royal family gathered for an Easter church service in Windsor.
The British media pored over the guest list, noting that while football star David Beckhamwho befriended William during England’s failed bid to host the 2018 World Cup-was invited, there is definitely no place for Sarah Ferguson. The absence of the ex-wife of Queen Elizabeth’s second son, Prince Andrew, will make the wedding a bittersweet occasion for their daughters Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, who will be attending. Also among the 1,900-strong congregation at Westminster Abbey will be “Mr Bean” actor Rowan Atkinson, a good friend of William’s father Prince Charles. Other invitees on the eclectic guest list will be linked to William’s charity work, such as a former homeless woman supported by charity Centrepoint of which the prince is patron. Shozna, 20, whose surname has not been revealed, will be treated to a royal makeover and will take her place alongside royals, celebrities and foreign dignitaries in Westminster Abbey. The young woman was helped by the charity after she suffered a stroke which paralysed the right side of her body and left her unable to speak. Bahrain’s crown prince on Sunday turned down a controversial invitation to the wedding to avoid causing potential embarrassment to Kate and William after protests in the Gulf kingdom were crushed by security forces in recent weeks. Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa complained that British media had “misrepresented” his stance and “clearly sought to involve my potential attendance as a political proxy for wider matters involving Bahrain.” It also emerged that a British Guardsman, 18-year-old
Cameron Reilly, has been removed from duties at the wedding after he described Kate as a “stuck-up cow” on his Facebook page. — AFP
Members of the British royal family, left to right, Princess Eugenie, Tim Lawrence, Sophie Countess of Wessex, Princess Beatrice and Princess Ann arrive to attend the Easter Matins at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle on Sunday in Windsor, England. —AP
A handout image obtained yesterday from the Lego press office shows figures representing members of Britain’s royal family (from L to R), Prince Harry, Camilla, The Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles, Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Elizabeth II. A bride and groom minifigures have been created to celebrate the royal wedding .—AP