| Jubilee Interview
| Below: Bernie Davis (left) and Nigel Catmur
Lighting the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Concert
The STLD met with LD Nigel Catmur to discuss his work on the events to mark the jubilee culminating with an impressive concert. Previous STLD meetings and articles in editions of Set and Light magazine have discussed the broadcasting of many royal events over the years, but few on quite such a superlative scale as the ‘Party at the Palace’ that celebrated the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. “The delivery of such a bombastically dazzling concert has to be considered even more of a triumph” wrote Neil McCormick, a critic in the Times, and Alex Petridis wrote in the Guardian: “…a show that grew more visually spectacular as night fell…”. To celebrate the Platinum Jubilee, a star-studded concert was broadcast live across the world featuring a vast range of performance genres spread over three stages outside Buckingham Palace. An evening of huge technical undertaking on many fronts led to a spectacular event, the visual impact of it felt by all who watched, even finding great praise in the media, but perhaps more so for those within the industry, a bastion of what we do that blew away the lockdown cobwebs and showed the world that this is a ‘viable industry’. To discuss the process of how an event on this scale and quality comes together, especially when under pressures such as approaching electrical storms, difficult schedules, unfortunately placed lamp posts Set & Light | Autumn 2022
and ever-changing ambient light levels, the STLD held a meeting hosted by Bernie Davis , where he talked with the concerts lighting designer Nigel Catmur to find out all about it. Bernie Davis: Thanks, for joining us Nigel. How did you first get involved in this event? Nigel Catmur: The concert was going to be produced entirely by BBC Studio Live Events. I’ve worked with the team on a lot of shows and about two years ago I got an inkling that the concert was probably going to come my way, but I wasn’t asked officially until last July. The tender for the set design contract was sent out to three set designers, ultimately being won by Ric Lipson of Stufish Entertainment Architects, but I was fortunate in that the lighting design came straight to me. My team included gaffer Mark Gardiner, programmers Alex Mildenhall, Martin Higgins, Matt Lee and Oliver Lifely. Tom Young had originally planned to be one of the programmers but sadly had to pull out at the last minute for family reasons. Aaron Thomas, from PixMob, programmed the audience’s illuminating wristbands – we hadn’t worked with Aaron before, but he’s a great guy and fitted into the team perfectly. Joe Marter was
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