The Royal Channel

In a likely act of subterfuge to divert her subjects’ attention away from the expected, yet no less despairing loss of Borat and Ali G, Queen Elizabeth II took her Annual Christmas Day Broadcast to the phosphor screens of cyberspace by way of her newly christened YouTube channel.

During yesterday’s 50^th anniversary of the royal message’s inaugural television broadcast – and the first time it’s been made immediately available to a web surfing public – the Queen addressed the Commonwealth and touched on the timeless topics of helping the disadvantaged and honoring the armed forces’ fallen.

Her Majesty hasn’t completely embraced the new medium – trimmings like leaving comments and embedding the clips have been disabled – and she may just be as pointless and ineffectual on the web as she is everywhere else, but the videos do offer some insight into regal marketing for an unfamiliar individual on the other side of the pond. Couple it with Downing Street’s coverage of Prime Minister’s Questions and you have a decent overview of the inner workings of a constitutional monarchy.

Why isn’t the US government doing something like this? An easy access repository on YouTube for presidential propaganda and nostalgia would allow for more people to be exposed to and enraged or elated by our own head of state. Videos of the First Dog I could do without, but the American equivalent of footage like Roses for the Rose Queen, 1917 would be very cool to watch.