In the end it was left to Daniel Bedingfield to thank his grandparents' generation for making the necessary sacrifices to win freedom from Nazi rule in Europe. Somehow that didn't seem right. There was nothing wrong with the message but Bedingfield – who reached the tops of the charts in 2002 with Gotta Get Thru This - seemed ill equipped to make it. It made you wonder if Dane Bowers had been asked but was too busy.
Still, that was the BBC's VE Day Party to Remember in Trafalgar Square last night. Down to the absence of any bigger event it became the national focus for the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe. In continental Europe there were large ceremonies, and in Russia the annual victory day parade was attended by world leaders. In Britain, the state event was a low key ceremony at the Cenotaph unattended by either the Queen or prime minister.
Through no fault of the BBC, it was hard not to watch the televised coverage of the Trafalgar Square event without feeling the veterans had been let down. The lowest point was Shane Ritchie (aka Eastenders' Alfie Moon) singing As Time Goes By from the film Casablanca. Ritchie may be many things but a silky-voiced singer is not among them. In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart famously asks the pianist Sam to play the song for him. If he had heard Ritchie's version, movie history would have been very different.
