Why I shall be up at dawn to watch the royal family in all its bizarre glory

Our great national roadshow will be out in force as Prince William and Kate Middleton get married on Friday. Don't be too cool to enjoy it – there's no shame in celebrating (or grieving) en masse
Prince William And Kate Middleton Visit Darwen
The nine-year courtship of Kate and William was too undramatic to excite the entire nation. Photograph: Indigo/Getty Images

The agreed national line on the royal wedding is: "Good luck to the youngsters, I hope they're happy, but I'm not very interested."

That is what everybody says. The engagement was announced to a roar of benevolent apathy. I have encountered neither republican fervour nor royalist excitement since this whole thing began, only a vague and indifferent goodwill.

I expect there'll be a large audience on Friday, just because it's on TV and most people are off work. There may even be an outbreak of cheerful, faintly ironic street parties. Still, nobody admits really to caring one way or the other.

That is not how I feel. I am extremely excited. I shall be up at dawn (an eventuality rarely achieved without a neighbour's drill) so as not to miss a second of the coverage.

I won't be one of those lightweights tuning in for the service alone. I'll be in the front of the television in my pyjamas hours before the start, demanding to hear canapés and fascinators debated as if they were troop movements in Libya. I want to see diagrams of the route and colour charts anticipating the Queen's hat. I want to be reminded that Kate is travelling from the royal suite of the Goring Hotel with its original 19th-century lavatory by Thomas Crapper. (It was puzzling that the Sun reported this without even attempting a throne joke).

Having said that, I struggle to feel a massive excitement about Kate Middleton herself. It's the main royal family I want to see, gathered in all its bizarre, comical glory. My hunger for them will never be sated.

I want the Queen, tiny and beaming in peach, escorted by the 200-year-old Duke of Edinburgh.

I want Princess Anne, grudgingly buttoned into a skirt suit she's been wearing since 1973.

I want Prince Charles, arriving a careful two minutes after his lesser siblings but five minutes before Her Majesty, in a vintage Bentley tweaked to run on apple juice.


I want Prince Edward, just because it's always hilarious to remember he exists.

How could anyone not be gripped by this roadshow? It's the gift that keeps on giving. I've tried to be a republican but, like trying to drink coffee, I can't make it stick. I was born preferring tea – and biscuits from a tin with the Queen Mother's face on it.

When I hear Colin Firth, a chap whose general sympathies are not unlike mine, revealing that he doesn't support the monarchy, I think: "Come on, Coren! That's where you should stand! Equality for all! Citizenship not subjection!"

But I just can't. Colour and sparkle are too attractive to my magpie gaze, and history is too romantic. I can't blind myself to their appeal. I'd be bored and cross if they were gone.

True, I grew up in a golden age for the royal soap: leaked affairs, tapped phones, endless scandal and shock divorce. This family will loom large for schoolchildren of the future, fat with memorability like Henry VIII. Their private scandals were conducted in parallel with an undeniable sense of public duty: that tension is fascinating, it's operatic. They are just never boring. They're so… not Dutch.

The royal wedding is a rare chance to see them clustered together in one delicious, historical, televised hit. The Windsor safari park in your very own home! How can anyone claim indifference?

My theory was that the bride in the centre just doesn't inspire strong feeling. Kate Middleton is neither a fairytale countess nor a fairytale commoner. She is a bit like us (no title, clothes from Jigsaw) and not at all like us (stunning, super-wealthy, no job), therefore we can neither root for our home girl nor be intrigued by her mysterious aristocracy.

Besides, a nine-year courtship is undramatic, unthrilling. People weren't hooked by the story, I theorised, so they just put it down after a few chapters, much as I did with We Need To Talk About Kevin.

"You're quite wrong," a friend of mine said the other day. "The reason nobody is showing any interest is because we're all so embarrassed by the Diana business."

The Diana business?

"All that sobbing in the street and leaving flowers," she went on. "The mass hysteria. The wall-to-wall coverage. Britain went mad for weeks. It was like we'd been drugged. Then we all came to our senses and now everyone looks back with terrible embarrassment and never wants to show interest again. It's like getting drunk and phoning someone you've just met to shriek that you love him. Forever after, you have to act as if you don't care whether he lives or dies – just to make it look like a blip, rather than full-on lunacy."

I was amazed. Royalists or otherwise, I thought two camps remained on the Diana mourning: those who still feel nostalgia and a lump in the throat, and those who considered the reaction vulgar and overblown. Can it be that everyone is embarrassed by hindsight?

Well, I'm bloody not. I am a bit embarrassed to admit my unshakeable fondness for the royal family (and I'm well aware that any further opinions from me may now be obsolete to some readers), but not remotely discomfited to say that I grieved for Princess Diana. I went to Kensington Palace the night she died, was moved to tears by the funeral and joined the silent crowd who watched her cortege drive slowly up the Hendon Way towards the M1 and Northamptonshire.

I am not embarrassed for myself nor anyone else who was there. The memory of a nation crying for someone they didn't know, and leaving flowers, doesn't make me feel ashamed of Britain; it makes me proud.

What kind of people would we be if we hadn't mourned her? We met her (many of us as small children) when she was 19. We watched her subsequent excitement and misery reflected in her changing body shape. We knew (whether we wanted to or not) about her awful parents, her difficult marriage and her struggle to fit in. We watched her fall in love with heart surgeons and rugby players, cads and bounders, on a doomed quest for completion and contentment that was deeply familiar to us – from novels, if not our own bumpy, imperfect lives.

She was the most famous woman in the world, and she was one of ours. She died suddenly, violently and young. A country which hadn't stopped in shock, which hadn't expressed collective sadness, which had shrugged and said "Meh, I didn't know her", is not a country I would want to live in.

If we were looking back now on a fascination with her life, followed by disinterest in her death, that is what would be shameful.

The British are sentimental people. We respond to narrative. Show us a short film of starving African children, tell us their names and we'll donate £74m in the middle of a gruelling recession. There's nothing wrong with sentimentality. Would we want to have a smaller heart?

Those Comic Relief kids are at the bottom of the luck ladder when it comes to money and luxury living, Diana was at the top. We can't imagine what it would be like to live at either of those extremes, but we can respond emotionally to the trials of both; that is a very true form of egalitarianism. Hurray for us.

Those snobs who spoke out in the first days after her death, already (and quite incorrectly) slamming the tearful displays as "unBritish", are quite happy to be moved by art. They'd be over the moon if their children cried at the death of King Lear or Boris Godunov. Those who grieved for the stranger Diana were also responding to a storyline. It may be more elegant to cry for people who lived centuries ago – or never – but it isn't "better".

Let the record show: Britain's reaction to Diana's death reflected well on us, not badly. It should be a source of pride.

And what the hell, let's enjoy the wedding. Don't be too cool, you might freeze. This is a sunny development to the story. This is the fun bit.