Elizabeth’s 1957 video has one mn hits on YouTube

LONDON - The first-ever Christmas video message by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth in 1957 has received over one million hits on video-sharing website YouTube.

The Royal family launched a dedicated channel on the website in 2007. This winter the channel passed a milestone of nine million views.

The queen’s 1957 address has received around 1.2 million hits, while her most recent Christmas Day broadcast has been viewed 82,000 times, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Broadcast from Sandringham, a private house owned by the royal family, the seven-minute black and white video shows a 31-year-old queen - wearing a three-stringed pearl necklace - glancing down at a written script as she expresses hopes that the “new medium” of television would bring her closer to her subjects.

“It is inevitable that I should seem a remote figure to many of you, a successor to the kings and queens of history. Someone whose face is familiar in newspapers and films, but who never really touches your personal lives. But now, at least for a few minutes. I welcome you to the peace of my own home,” she said.

The queen also called for protection of religion and moral decency in Britain, in an age of rapid technological change.

“It is not the new inventions that are the difficulty. The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery. They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless.”