With Britain luxuriating in a warm bath of post-royal wedding pomp, The Queen’s Coronation in Colour (ITV) came at a good time. It was perhaps a little odd that they didn’t broadcast it on Saturday, which would have been the actual 65th anniversary of the Queen’s Coronation, but then ITV had international football and the British Soap Awards on then, so something had to give.
Scheduling apart, Alexander Armstrong’s cheery perusal of an event that brought the Queen, via the newly popular medium of television, closer to her subjects than ever before, was a visual feast. It wasn’t just the much-celebrated film of the pageantry itself, mesmerising though that remains: it was grainy archive footage...