I'm told, by people who know about such things, that there was some wedding or other on Friday. Apparently, it attracted quite a bit of interest, and... oh, I give up. I'm not even going to bother pretending humorous ignorance, because it's really far too preposterous. In point of fact, there was no getting away from the blasted thing all day. The BBC had intermittent coverage all day, including in the evening. What exactly they were covering at that point, I have no idea; I can only assume they had all their cameras trained on Buckingham Palace, in the hope that they might spot someone of some importance through a window or some such. In fairness, though, the Beeb is the national broadcaster, so obviously they were bound to devote a lot of time to something that attracted such national interest. The same could tentatively be said for Sky and, perhaps, ITV. But Living TV (or Sky Living or whatever the bloody hell it is now)? RTÉ? TV3? At least More4 had the decency to show Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, so I could lose myself in a world of snarky outlaws for a couple of hours, until the hullaballoo had died down a little.
That said, the Guardian were kind enough to provide an excellent antidote to all of this, in the form of their "Not the Royal Wedding" live blog, dedicated to absolutely everything else that happened on the 29th of April. On their home page, meanwhile, they rather brilliantly had a "republicans click here" button, which hid all the royal wedding news from view. For any repentant ex-republicans, the news could be magically restored with a simple click of the corresponding "royalists click here" button. Sadly, both are now down, but trust me; they were entertaining. Thankfully, Andrew Sullivan noted it too, as if to prove that I'm not entirely insane.
I spent much of the day on Twitter, noting various reactions to the royal couple. Comedians, as usual, were all over the thing; serial tweeter Chris Addison, in particular. Most of them, naturally, were rather snarky and cynical (in fairness, I can't really exclude my own contributions from that); plus a bit of pushback against that (in which I, erm, also sort of participated. Never rely on me in any kind of civil war situation). My favourite contribution of the day, though, was from the Manic Street Preachers (or, more likely, their press office) in the form of their "best anti-monarchy songs". Funnily enough, number 2 of 5 on the list was the song "Repeat" from the Manics' first album Generation Terrorists. In fairness, it is a great song, but even so...
Naturally, there was a great deal of live-blogging going on too, even apart from the Twitter folks. Most of them were nice, straightforward, stately affairs. I understand the Telegraph's started around Monday or Tuesday; I can't quite recall (which just goes to show how bloody long ago it was). My favourite, though, was definitely Steven Baxter's wonderfully satirical affair (echoed, naturally, enough, on his Twitter page). It did remind of the abject failure of my past live-blogging events, though. I'm going to see Thor soon; perhaps, as a big comics fan, I should live-blog that.
And there you have it. Yes, for someone who didn't care much about the wedding, I did pay an awful lot of attention to the coverage of it. The fact is, though, I have a great interest in popular culture, so it was fascinating to me. I also spend an awful lot of time on the Internet, especially with exams coming up. Besides, there really was nowhere to run to on Friday. The tendrils of media coverage snaked everywhere. If that image disturbs you, well, now you know how I felt.
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