Yesterday afternoon I asked the five people I was with whether any of them had ever seen even a tiny part of a Queen's Christmas Day address as it was broadcast? The answer I got was no and this is in line with my experience - I've seen excerpts a few hours later on the News, but I've never watched a second of it as it was being broadcast in my life and I can't think of anyone I know well who admits to watching it once, let alone every year.

Yet, there seems to be an acceptance among some that sitting down with your family after Christmas dinner to listen to what the Queen has to say is some great British institution. Since their low point after Princess Diana's death, the Royal Family has become a lot more popular in the last twenty years, so maybe it's a generational thing and it is those who are a lot younger than me who are responsible for this - I'd be very surprised if it was though.

Somebody must watch it, because in recent years it has attracted the biggest television audience over the Christmas period - typically, in the region of 8 or 9 million watch it, but that's a long way short of the 28 million who watched her in 1987 (that would have been around half of the population of the UK at that time).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz...long-last.html