With Ben Whishaw voicing the character, and with a cast including Hugh Grant in the scene-stealing role of the dastardly villain, Phoenix Buchanan, Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters and Brendan Gleeson, it’s gone right up into the canon of the best British films of all time. after the Queen’s funeral on Monday 19 September. While the BBC screened Paddington – the first film – on Saturday 17 September during the national mourning period, it chose to broadcast the second film, 2017’s Paddington 2.

Karen Jankel, the daughter of the Paddington creator, the late Michael Bond, told the BBC how it had been “extraordinary” to see people mourning the Queen alongside the little bear and his beloved sandwiches: “If somebody told me a year ago that the Queen was sadly going to die, and when she did, that Paddington would be a very large part of it, I would be utterly amazed.” Then she agreed to act in a sketch written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce for the 2022 Platinum Jubilee celebrations of her coronation. The iconic duo was further cemented in 2006, when a pantomime called The Queen’s Handbag was performed as part of the Queen’s 80th birthday celebrations. Almost 30 years later, Bond wrote Paddington At The Palace, in which the bear waves a Union Jack and spots the Queen through a window. The history of HRH and the bear goes back to 1958, when Paddington creator Michael Bond released his first children’s book entitled A Bear Called Paddington, about an Anglophile bear who lands in London at Paddington station and is given a home by the Brown family.

How had the death of the reigning monarch become synonymous with a quaint snack to the entire nation? Through its Peruvian conduit: a little bear named Paddington. The strangest point in the national mourning of the death of Queen Elizabeth II was surely the official request for the public to stop leaving marmalade sandwiches at Buckingham Palace.

A bear named paddington