Kate Green visits the team behind The Queen’s 90th-birthday celebrations at Royal Windsor Horse Show, which promises to be a spectacular and ambitious occasion.
FROM outside comes the soporific, steady clop of hooves on cobbles and,inside, show organiser Penny Henderson’s Dandie Dinmont snoozes rhythmically in his basket,yet there’s a perceptible upping of the tempo in the HPower office in the environs of Windsor Castle. Eight weeks from my visit, the company will produce the Royal Windsor Horse Show, which, each evening,features a lavish tribute to The Queen, who has never missed the show in all its 73 years.
‘I’m starting to have sleepless nights,’ admits chief executive Simon Brooks-Ward. ‘This is by far the most complex thing we’ve done. What keeps me awake is that when we did the Diamond Jubilee celebrations [in 2012], there were no expectations.With this, the tickets sold out in three hours and our website is receiving 600 hits a second. It’s Scary Mary stuff. It’s been 21.5 years in the planning and now we’re in ground rush.’
HPower’s CV includes celebrations for the Golden Jubilee and the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday and the First World War commemorations at Mons, Belgium, last year, but this is an ambitious undertaking, packing 90 years of a monarch’s life into 90 minutes with 900 horses and 1,500 people from 12 countries.
For instance, the New Zealand army band will have just 21.5 minutes to play Chariots of Fire, ‘take the mickey’ out of The King’s Troop and perform a Highland Fling, can-can and haka.
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