The pomp! The circumstance! When it comes to the range of royal family engagements, there are none quite as ceremonial (and, frankly, iconic) as an appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony.
Whoa, I Can’t Believe This Surprising Item Has Been Hidden on the Royal Balcony for Years
It also could be a reason for Prince Louis’s antics
Published Jan 12, 2026
•5:47pm
SplashNews.com/Shutterstock
SplashNews.com/Shutterstock
Barring a royal wedding or an historic national holiday (we’re talking about you, 80th anniversary of VE Day), the royals—King Charles, Kate Middleton and Prince William all included—are guaranteed to appear front and center and in a bit of a lineup one time per year. (That’s for the king’s unofficial birthday, honored annually at Trooping the Colour in June, for those who are wondering.)
But that’s just it. For that singular appearance, we’re so zoomed in on what matters—the fashion, the flyover, not to mention who’s up there in the first place—that, according to a new report in Hello!, we’ve apparently been missing a hidden detail all these years: TVs.
Apparently, they’re placed just out of sight, but inside the balcony area so as to let the royals not only catch a glimpse of the Mall, but also a view of themselves. How are they kept hidden? By the red drapery that’s also on display for such occasions. Without the TVs, the Queen Victoria Memorial would block the royal family’s view of just how many people gathered to see them.
SplashNews.com/Shutterstock
But that begs the question—also mentioned by Hello!—does a sight of themselves on TV influence how everyone behaves? For example, are Prince Louis’s antics authentic or is he simply hamming it up for the camera after seeing himself on-screen? We’ll never know.
Either way, it’s kind of cool to get a bit of a behind-the-scenes in terms of the staging of that appearance, which is already chock-full of royal protocol and history, too. But TVs or not, we’re glad members of the family—ahem, Louis—still manage to find a way to go off-script.
