Victoria and Albert: The Wedding

Some jobs are like super tankers. By the time you’ve reached the pointy end, you can’t see the stern. Even with binoculars. I embarked on Victoria and Albert: The Royal Wedding, (BBC 2 on 21st December at 2030, and again on Christmas Day in the morning), when Spring had just sprung. We shot the drama in high Summer and the interviews in early Autumn.
The edit began when the swallows were heading off, and as the clocks went back, we could see the coast. Now we’re in the docks I can’t remember the rush of shooting 15 scenes of reconstruction every day for five days, or in the chapel, trying to make 60 extras look like 300, or shooting the making of a copper tin in which we’d bake sections of the 300lb cake, 9-feet circumference.
I’ve not forgotten the fabulous email sent by an incoming Commissioning Editor, who, in a staggering hand-brake turn, now wanted to reduce the bodice-ripping in favour of more constructed reality: “I know it seems crazy, but what we lose in romance we gain in pace and clarity”.
Maybe it’s like childbirth. Nature makes you forget the hard part so sight of the luscious baby makes you want to do it again. Please join Lucy Worsley and her throng of new presenters in a right royal, quite romantic romp.