“I think we need to call the bosses..”
All newsrooms are nervous about how they'll cover a royal death - but that fear is strongest inside the BBC. The moment's been planned, debated and agonised over for decades, and now it's arrived.
In January 1936, King George V’s physician announced that the monarch’s life was “peacefully moving towards its close.” What Lord Dawson never revealed, what remained secret for fifty years, was that he administered a fatal overdose of morphine, so that the king’s death could be announced in the morning papers “rather than the less appropriate evening journals.”
The idea of what is “appropriate” still looms large in newsroom discussions of reporting the Royal Family, in particular the long-rehearsed plans for the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
One of the first things you learn in every job is the “Obit” plan — who to call, what to do, how to avoid a career-ending blunder.
In one job, I was shown the location of the cupboard, filled with appropriately downbeat CDs to play between news bulletins. In another I was shown how to automatically take a global network of stations off air and switch them to rolling news coverage. Elsewhere I was told to buy a couple of biographies, and brush up on royal lives in case I had to talk about them for two or three hours.
Years later I would write, and re-write, the Queen’s obituary. Long pieces for radio and online that would sit in a folder marked **HOLD**, so they wouldn’t be accidentally published too soon, updated every year or so with the latest events.
I regularly chatted to others doing similar roles elsewhere, comparing notes on our plans. How long would they go without commercials? When would they try playing “normal” music? How big would another story need to be to interrupt our rolling memorial
We spent hours rehearsing every kind of scenario, from peaceful departures in the night to violent acts of sabotage or terrorism. Eventually, after one too many leaks and near-misses, we stopped using real names in these dry runs, instead solemnly paying tribute to “Mrs Robinson”, whose death had, in our rehearsal studio, just been announced.
Nervousness about royal deaths permeates all news organisations. But the fear of getting something wrong, or mis-judging the mood, is strongest inside the BBC.
There is an acute awareness that, while not officially a state broadcaster, the BBC is effectively the voice of Britain. Once it announces a monarch’s death, the world will follow, all citing the BBC’s report as sufficient proof.
Accuracy isn’t the main fear, but trickier questions of tone. Some will complain about over-the-top, wall-to-wall coverage during this period of official mourning. Its roots lie in events of twenty years ago.
In the months before the Queen Mother’s death in 2002, broadcasters took turns to position an outside broadcast unit at Windsor, just in case.
A few months earlier there’d been rolling coverage of the 9/11 attacks, which prompted some to question whether plans for the Queen Mother were a little excessive.
“You can’t” one radio station executive told me “treat the death of one very old woman as a tragedy greater than the simultaneous murders of 3,000 people.”
Which may be why, when news of the Queen Mother’s death emerged on the Saturday afternoon of the Easter weekend, some in the BBC were allegedly at pains to rein in their coverage.
Peter Sissons, the presenter charged with announcing her passing, related in his memoirs how senior figures told him not to “go overboard”, told him to wear a burgundy rather than a black tie, to remember that she was a very old woman “who had to go sometime.”
Rolling coverage lasted only a few hours, and the BBC resumed a relatively normal, if toned-down, schedule. But the public reaction to the Queen Mother’s death was far stronger than many had expected — 200,000 would queue to file past her coffin — and some papers turned on the BBC — and Peter Sissons personally — for purported “disrespect”.
When the Duke of Edinburgh died last year, the BBC collapsed its radio stations into a single, news-only, service, and did the same on television. Other networks were shut down for the night.
Thousands complained, and some even likened the BBC’s approach to that seen in Pyongyang. But broadcasters would rather be accused of doing too much than too little.
Now, the moment that’s been planned, debated and agonised over for decades has arrived, and doubtless some will binge on Netflix or Disney rather than sit through a fourth documentary about the Queen’s love of horses.
It won’t change anything. The BBC must be seen to do this properly, reverently. It must be “appropriate”. And so far, it has been. Calm, authoritative, emotional at the right times.
And, probably, in tune with a significant proportion of public opinion. This isn’t just another news story — it’s a huge, historic event. That’s why we’ve spent so much time thinking about it, rehearsing, writing and re-writing, committed to getting it right.
These moments of significance, when there’s silence, a red light, a microphone and a nervous feeling in the pit of your stomach, are the reasons many of us went into this trade in the first place.
Many of us will claim we’d prayed for it to happen on someone else’s shift, while secretly hoping for a ringside seat at moments of history. But when they come, we are — almost all of us — doing our best.
