Lasting an hour and three quarters, it first aired on the BBC on June 21 and was repeated on ITV a week later, reaching nearly 70 per cent of the country. The programme’s screening was the most significant television moment since the Coronation. “No one who knew the Queen would have dreamed of suggesting that she was capable of such waste.” “This was as far from the truth, as was the suggestion that the food, once cooked before the cameras, was thrown out or given to the dogs. “This was later characterised as an event specially set up for the cameras,” he recalls. Her press secretary William Heseltine recalls understandable nerves ahead of filming a picnic on the shores of Loch Muick, although everyone soon relaxed. The world would sit open-mouthed, watching the Queen taking Prince Edward to buy an ice cream at the shop on the edge of the estate, or the family preparing a barbecue.
It would not only herald a sudden re-engagement with the public but cast the family in a new and popular light, thanks in part to the TV documentary, Royal Family.Ī BBC team had filmed scenes which would once have been deemed sacrosanct – the Queen at her desk, in her train, on board an aeroplane and, most memorably, on holiday with her family at Balmoral.
The summer of 1969 remains one of the great landmarks of the reign.
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