In the year before Prince Philip was born, 1920, the British empire was the largest it would ever be. The year after he was born, 1922, Charles Francis Jenkins demonstrated the first principles of the television.
The changes driven by decolonisation and the invention of the modern media, between them, could easily have ended the reign of the House of Windsor. The fact that they didn’t, the success of the British monarchy in transitioning from the divine rulers at the apex of history’s biggest empire to the celebrities at the centre of a modern nationalist project built on TV and the tabloids, was, in large part, because of the duke of Edinburgh, who died today at 99.
As chair of the Queen’s coronation committee in 1953, Philip proposed a radical idea: why not televise it? The result was the most-watched TV show in history at the time, doing more than anything else to make television a mainstream medium.
