Queen goes digital

I was just reading on BBC News that the Queens Speech is going to be available as a podcast for the first time this year.

But it really isn’t though is it? At least not in the true sense of the word. To me a podcast is the overal show concept - so MacBreak Weekly is the podcast and (for example) iPhone My Eye (20) is the episode.

Some British newspapers and more or less every government department seems to have thrown this out. For example, the 10 downing street podcast calls each individual show released ‘a podcast’, like the Eddie Izzard Podcast released under the Downing Street feed.

Maybe it’s moving to that though - instead of a podcast being released under a single feed, we’ll start to see ‘feeds’ being released with multiple podcasts.

So maybe we will see a Radio 4 feed with all the seperate BBC Radio 4 podcasts released under that single, large feed - tWiT could do the same.

Back to the Queen though. I’ve spent the last 15 years, since I was about 10, trying to avoid the Queen’s speech on television.

Unfortunatly while I still lived at home I was forced to watch it as my mum is a major royalist and my parents insisted on us spending Christmas day together as a family (I couldn’t go to my room).

Then I got married and moved to Jersey with my wife. Things didn’t improve though - I now end up having to watch the Queen’s speech because my Mother in Law spends Christmas with us and she is just as much of a royalist as my mum is.

Originally when I saw the fact that it was being made available as a podcast I jumped up and said “I spend a decade trying to avoid it on TV, do they really think I’ll go out of my way to actually download the bloody thing”.

Then I realised I wasn’t the only person in the world and in fact there are a lot of royalist nutcases in the UK so I should shut up.

However I now think it’s a bloody good idea. If we can get the royalist nutcases to watch the Queen’s speech on their own terms on a computer we might be able to campaign harder for it to be removed from our TV screens.

It will never happen but let a man dream!

I wan’t to use the term republican, but as the web is an international affair and there are a lot of Americans online, the term would more likely be taken in the sense that I’m a member of a ‘right wing party’ instead of the sense it’s meant - someone who doesn’t think a modern 21st Century country should have a Monach at its head.

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