Diana Wichtel: Jubilee and Kid Sister show value of traditions

A hologram of Queen Elizabeth II during her coronation in the Gold State Coach during the Platinum Jubilee Pageant. Photo / AP

OPINION

A hologram in a 260-year-old gold carriage: the Queen attended her Jubilee Pageant parade in pixels if not in person. Spooky. And very 21st century, yet also not unlike some Victorian parlour optical illusion. A fitting tribute for an ancient institution that, no matter what it does, even a touching, slightly lonely comedy skit with an animated bear, can never be truly modern.

You must salute Jubilee shenanigans that went far beyond standard British eccentricity. Someone should have checked the clock faces of Big Ben to see if time itself had melted in sympathy with the Dali-grade surreality as the most enduring reign in British history was celebrated with pomp, ceremony, and a fair amount of random headless chookery.

Long to reign over us: 70 years and counting. My attachment to the British royal family tends to be more anthropological than emotional. Either way, the four days of festivities for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee (or #plattyjubes, on social media) had, as the Queen has said of herself, to be seen to be believed. Flag-waving, face painting, bunting, biscuits, a pack of mad puppet corgis, some women dressed as swans because the Queen somehow owns all the swans in England, Paddington Bear, the mercurial moods of Prince Louis … Queen Elizabeth II's historic milestone was celebrated with all the solemnity of a particularly ambitious child's birthday party. There's always been an element of arrested development about the monarchy.

And yet it was moving. Something about continuity in our fracturing age. My life began shortly before the inauguration of the second Elizabethan Age. I've never been a monarchist. In my hippie youth we got poked by the umbrellas of old ladies for refusing to stand for the Queen at the movies. But several friends in the UK, not huge fans of the House of Windsor, admitted they were off to Jubilee events and street parties. Not so much in honour of the royals but to mark a moment in time and a post-lockdown sense of community. To be part of the stream of history.

New Zealand's first Jewish sitcom, Simone Nathan's excellent Kid Sister (TVNZ on Demand) is also about the complicated inheritance that is continuity and tradition. Nathan plays Lulu, back home from overseas, living with her parents, with only a secret and emphatically not Jewish boyfriend by way of a plan and a subplot about STDs for distraction. Her mother (Amanda Billing in Zambesi with a South African accent) is, well, a Jewish mother. Her dad wants to get her on track to fulfilling her cultural obligations by finding a nice Jewish boy. An exchange between them economically lays out the territory.

Lulu: "You're about to guilt me with the H bomb."

Dad: "Firstly, 'H bomb' is an inappropriate term for the Holocaust … and if I've done my job right you should be old enough to guilt yourself."

No pressure. No spoilers but I found Lulu's answer to her increasingly complicated situation a little confronting, as other people's choices often are. Episode description: "Lulu forges ahead with her foolhardy plans." Still, this wouldn't be the comedy gold it is if she took my advice.

The series repays a second viewing to catch the deeper themes, mostly lightly thrown away between laughs. As with the British royals, however messed up things can get, the past has a way of refusing to be consigned to history. Lulu's dad tells her, "We're trying to keep something ancient alive in a world that wants us to give it all up."

Kid Sister.

Kid Sister offers clues to why cultures, anyone's, might value rituals and traditions no one else can really see the point of. There's a terrific funeral scene. It had me thinking of my choice, when we found my lost father's grave in Canada and made him a new headstone, to not say kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Dad was an atheist. That was my reason.

Kid Sister made me think that next time we visit him I will say it. It won't be about religion. It will be about finding ways to keep something ancient alive.