Queen Elizabeth II and Paddington Bear: Some Features of a Popularity-Maintaining Discourse

The paper analyses a short two-and-a-half-minute sketch, a video presented to the U.K. public on the occasion of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June 2022. The BAFTA-winning video features Queen Elizabeth II receiving Paddington Bear, the fictional character in children’s literature, for tea at the Palace at the time of the Jubilee party. For most people, this was one of the last images of the Queen making a public appearance before her subsequent death in September that year. Her association with the endeared character proved to be exceptionally strong in the public conscience as representative for values that she wished to embody: politeness, kindness and tolerance, as the nation’s „grandmother” reassures, through her presence, that her people has been properly inspired and imprinted by such qualities. The article focuses on linguistic, mainly pragmatic features of the characters’ interaction, trying to determine how the monarch’s Image could be projected as a discourse construct.