A celebration fit for a queen

(CBS News) It's a historic sight that's fit for a queen. Some are calling it the biggest gathering along the banks of the River Thames in 350 years, as both royals and dignitaries prepare for this morning's Diamond Jubilee Pageant. Queen Elizabeth II is the the pageant's honoree . . . and the subject of this morning's Cover Story reported by Mark Phillips:

It's a royal story. Cue the trumpets! (It's hard not to start a story about Queen Elizabeth without a fanfare.)

Let's face it: After 60 years of the same monarch - and the same ceremonies - it does all start to look a bit familiar.

Yet, familiarity is a large part of what queens are all about - especially one who's been around this long.

"Prime ministers may come and go," said society magazine editor Rachel Johnson, "and princesses may come and go. But she is there.

"Being there for 60 years, not changing," said Johnson. "Still doing the wave, still doing the screwing-in=the-light bulb motion in the glass coach. Just doing the same thing year in, year out, taking the bouquet from the little girl in bobby socks, wearing the hat, wearing those square heeled shoes ...

"This has given us all an incredible sense of reassurance in these turbulent times."

So, how do you celebrate a milestone of this significance? Yet another royal carriage procession just wouldn't do.

The answer lay in an old painting. ,/P>

An evocative image, ticking all the mythological boxes of royal grandness and British maritime power.

Elizabeth II, too, could become the Queen who launched a thousand ships.

Historian David Starkey consulted on the river's royal past: "I think it's a kind of throwback to the great glory days of Elizabethan buccaneers, the glory days of the British Navy - there always in the background, the queen's sentimental longing for the royal yacht Britannia, or whatever."

So from the great rivers and backwaters of the realm, boats are on the move to join The Queen in the Diamond Jubilee Royal River Pageant.

One, The Collie, has a history of service as a Navy tender going back to the 1890s.

She was sunk in 1942, but happily refloated. It's now owned by Paul Woodhead, who goes back a long way with the Queen, too. He was there at the coronation - singing as a choir boy at Westminster Abbey. "Born under a lucky star," he said.

"I was there at the beginning with the Queen, very small, sort of very focused and apprehensive, walking up the Abbey," he recalled.

And this weekend? "She will be up front on a boat somewhere and I'll be behind with all my flags flying."

"She really couldn't have done it without you, could she?" asked Phillips.

"Probably not!" Woodhead laughed.

A lot of people feel that way - that the Queen has been part of their lives, that she's not just a ceremonial head of state, not just a living link with Britain's past glory, but the embodiment of the British carry-on-regardless spirit.

"Now, with this jubilee celebration, I really feel that the country is suddenly, is actually recognizing the amazing job she's done," Woodhead said.

"I think there's a general sense that she's done her job well - no one is quite sure what her job is, but whatever the job is she's done it well," said historian David Starkey. "There's what is a very English characteristic in regard to people who stick at something that they don't necessary like very much, and curiously enough we have a lot of evidence the queen doesn't really like ceremony. She already has expressed, perhaps incautiously and unwisely, doubts about that whole boat thing, if we may quote it. And I'm sure it's absolutely true she's stuck at it, she's done it.

"And the sight of, you know, a game - that wonderful English word! - a game, 86-year-old lady, going through this kind of thing is rather heartwarming, and that I think goes a long way."

It's gone a long way for a long time. It was 55 years ago that the Queen first embraced TV as a way of reaching out to her people:

"It's inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you, a successor to the kings and queens of history," she told a broadcast audience in 1957. "Someone whose face may seem familiar from newspapers and films but who never really touches your personal lives. But now, at least for a few minutes, I welcome you to the peace of my own home."

And with the help of TV, she's become probably the most well-known woman in the world - a person whose voyage through life has mirrored our own, becoming a mother and a grandmother . . . enjoying the highs . . . living through the lows.

None lower than the death of Princess Diana, when the royal family was too slow to tune into the national sense of loss.

"There was a sense that they didn't mind, they didn't care, they weren't grief-struck like the rest of the nation," said Johnson.

Diana's children - and the person one of them has married - have helped re-launch the royal brand. More and more they're carrying the royal mail. Recent opinion polls show the Queen is now more popular than she's ever been.

"Now we see the spokesmodel-type royals, who look fantastic," said Johnson. "I mean, you know, rail thin Hollywood types, who are turning into the biggest celebrities in the world and so that is inevitably sprinkling its fairy dust over all of them."

"Was that deliberate or was that an accident?" asked Phillips.

"What did Freud say? There's no such thing as an accident," Johnson replied. "Sure, they must have realized that these are attractive, engaging young people that everyone can relate to. I mean, Harry is funny, he is a card, and Kate Middleton is straight-forwardly nice and fantastically glamorous, and Prince William is going to be king. I mean, what's not to like?"

There are a few voices in the wilderness wondering how a hereditary monarchy fits into a modern world.

"I think the monarchy in some regards feels pretty alien to modern Britain," said Greg Jenner, a historian and writer on the kids' TV show "Horrible Histories." "Obviously still the Queen has a very high approval rating. But I think if you took the analogy of a house, the monarchy feels like a room which doesn't really fit in with the rest of the decor. You know, there's some lime green sofas and some chintzy wallpaper, and I think the rest of modern Britain has been updated.

"You could argue that actually William is a slightly newer version of the sofa," Jenner said.

No one is arguing, though, that the Queen doesn't serve a function . . . ceremonial, constitutional . . . a figurehead above the fray.

The peoples' monarch.

In the end, is the Jubilee just an excuse for a party?

"She is an excuse for a party, and wouldn't so many heads of state, including President Obama, like the same?" said Starkey. "If you enter into the people's heart, however crudely, however simply, that I think is rather a good thing. It's true of very few world leaders."

For more info:

• "Horrible Histories" (Scholastic)
• "Horrible Histories" (CBBC series)