Incredibly, it is ten years ago today since I began this little project with my first post, a review of the (then most recent) 2010 Christmas Broadcast. To mark the event, I am making this special post, which for the first time ever is not a review of one of Queen Elizabeth II's many Christmas messages.
While I have modified and embellished several of my earliest posts over the years, the 2010 review still seems curiously untouched; just a few, short self-conscious paragraphs together with an accompanying publicity photograph of Her Majesty at Hampton Court Palace. I think I like it that way!
When I began this blog, the Queen's Christmas Message was regarded by most simply as something that was; an annual tradition, loved and cherished by millions, largely unchanging and come 3.15pm on Christmas Day afternoon over for another year. It had only been a couple of years or so earlier, with the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark 1957 Broadcast, that the media started to show more interest in the history of the programme: how the technology and Elizabeth II's appearance had changed over the years, how the tone of Her Majesty's words had changed and what had remained constant. There has even been at least one book written on the subject, Ingrid Seward's The Queen's Speech in 2015, although this seems to use Elizabeth II's Christmas messages more as a framework for a potted chronology of her reign than present a history of the productions themselves.
Over the past decade I have become more knowledgeable, observant and confident about my subject matter. My posts have become progressively longer and more elaborate, to the extent that I wrote twice as much about 1969, a year when there was no Broadcast, than I did about the 2010 production in my first review! Only here can you find out fascinating minor details such as how Her Majesty began wearing spectacles to read her Christmas messages in 1991, then suddenly stopped again in 2017! Or that a Christmas tree did not appear in-vision in a Broadcast until as late as 1987.
This blog has never yet 'taken off' as such, but I have not been particularly keen to publicise it significantly until I have an up-to-date chronology of every Christmas Broadcast of Elizabeth II's reign. At the time of writing, I have only a small handful of the Queen's earliest speeches left to review. It has taken ten years to get to this point! I have updated this blog when time, energy and inspiration allowed. It seems that 2016 and 2017 were the years I made hay while the sun shone, whereas grim years such as 2020 have been far less productive.
Over the last ten years I have had visitors from as far afield as the United States, Canada, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates. There has been internet 'traffic' from most European countries at some point. To all those who visited, I am grateful and I hope you found something of interest. Most visits tend to come during December, but I do realise that this is a kind of 'pop-up shop' of blogs, with an optimum period when people are likely to call!
After I complete my final historical review (which will be of the 1952 Broadcast, Elizabeth II's first as Queen), I will have to decide how I develop this blog from there. Until then, I might just take a small amount of pride in my little achievement!
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