Elizabeth II

[Thoughtful Monk]

From reading that article in The Guardian I realise that but does the BBC know something no one else does? I suspect not. It seems more like preparation for the inevitable.

Here in the US, CNN and Fox News are giving the situation the same preparation for the inevitable treatment.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

I'm actually familiar with London Bridge, as I'm a (small) part of it. I've been having planning meetings about it since ~2016/7, if I remember correctly.

I may find the concept of a royal family repugnant, but it's part of my job to make sure my part of London Bridge goes to plan- for those who care about such things.

Even those of us who are not Royalists will recognise this as the end of an era for the UK.

When the day comes for you I hope your duties are not too onerous.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

Small mercies - his narcissistic unhappiness with missing out will at least give me some comfort.



I've never seen it, so it depends where it is up to... will it end on a cliff-hanger, do you think?

Oh the best bits were due to be aired - Diana, divorce, and death!

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

She could have died an hour or two ago, or it may be merely a health scare. When she dies isn't necessarily the exact time it's officially announced - though the media will be notified beforehand.

From reading that article in The Guardian I realise that but does the BBC know something no one else does? I suspect not. It seems more like preparation for the inevitable.

[EvoUK]

Reading this, I did think it a tad premature: For those who may not know, Huw Edwards is a BBC "news anchor". My emphasis.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...-queens-health

The BBC has suspended programming on its main channel to move to blanket news coverage as concerns grow about the Queen’s medical condition.

BBC One, the most popular channel in the UK, interrupted Bargain Hunt just after 12.30pm to deliver a statement from Buckingham Palace which said that doctors are “concerned” for her health.

The 96-year-old, who broke with tradition to remain at her summer home of Balmoral to greet the new prime minister, Liz Truss, earlier this week, has been suffering from “episodic mobility problems” since last year.

BBC One has switched to a BBC News Special until at least 6pm, when the corporation’s evening news programme airs, which is being led by presenter Huw Edwards.

Edwards is dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and black tie – in line with the corporation’s on-air dress code when a royal family member dies as a mark of respect.

The poor old lady is not officially dead yet!

She could have died an hour or two ago, or it may be merely a health scare. When she dies isn't necessarily the exact time it's officially announced - though the media will be notified beforehand.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

I wish the Queen a speedy recovery.

Live coverage from the BBC.

At her age, and having lost her husband of 73+ years with all the attendant personal trauma and grief at his death, that might be a forlorn hope. Given that she was also [apparently] a very active woman, this mobility issue that she has been suffering might be driving her quietly mad and she may just feel like giving up, as very old people often do.

[EvoUK]

For those who are interested - and this is what The Guardian terms the long read - this is [at least some] of what Britain can look forward to. It was published in 2017 so the reference to the PM as "she" referred to Theresa May not the present incumbent, Liz Truss

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...-london-bridge

In the plans that exist for the death of the Queen – and there are many versions, held by Buckingham Palace, the government and the BBC – most envisage that she will die after a short illness. Her family and doctors will be there. When the Queen Mother passed away on the afternoon of Easter Saturday, in 2002, at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, she had time to telephone friends to say goodbye, and to give away some of her horses. In these last hours, the Queen’s senior doctor, a gastroenterologist named Professor Huw Thomas, will be in charge. He will look after his patient, control access to her room and consider what information should be made public. The bond between sovereign and subjects is a strange and mostly unknowable thing. A nation’s life becomes a person’s, and then the string must break.

There will be bulletins from the palace – not many, but enough. “The Queen is suffering from great physical prostration, accompanied by symptoms which cause much anxiety,” announced Sir James Reid, Queen Victoria’s physician, two days before her death in 1901. “The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close,” was the final notice issued by George V’s doctor,Lord Dawson, at 9.30pm on the night of 20 January 1936. Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine – enough to kill him twice over – in order to ease the monarch’s suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.

Her eyes will be closed and Charles will be king. His siblings will kiss his hands. The first official to deal with the news will be Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, a former diplomat who was given a second knighthood in 2014, in part for planning her succession.
Geidt will contact the prime minister. The last time a British monarch died, 65 years ago, the demise of George VI was conveyed in a code word, “Hyde Park Corner”, to Buckingham Palace, to prevent switchboard operators from finding out. For Elizabeth II, the plan for what happens next is known as “London Bridge.” The prime minister will be woken, if she is not already awake, and civil servants will say “London Bridge is down” on secure lines. From the Foreign Office’s Global Response Centre, at an undisclosed location in the capital, the news will go out to the 15 governments outside the UK where the Queen is also the head of state, and the 36 other nations of the Commonwealth for whom she has served as a symbolic figurehead – a face familiar in dreams and the untidy drawings of a billion schoolchildren – since the dawn of the atomic age.

For a time, she will be gone without our knowing it. The information will travel like the compressional wave ahead of an earthquake, detectable only by special equipment. Governors general, ambassadors and prime ministers will learn first. Cupboards will be opened in search of black armbands, three-and-a-quarter inches wide, to be worn on the left arm.

The rest of us will find out more quickly than before. On 6 February 1952, George VI was found by his valet at Sandringham at 7.30am. The BBC did not broadcast the news until 11.15am, almost four hours later. When Princess Diana died at 4am local time at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris on 31 August 1997, journalists accompanying the former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, on a visit to the Philippines knew within 15 minutes. For many years the BBC was told about royal deaths first, but its monopoly on broadcasting to the empire has gone now. When the Queen dies, the announcement will go out as a newsflash to the Press Association and the rest of the world’s media simultaneously. At the same instant, a footman in mourning clothes will emerge from a door at Buckingham Palace, cross the dull pink gravel and pin a black-edged notice to the gates. While he does this, the palace website will be transformed into a sombre, single page, showing the same text on a dark background.

Screens will glow. There will be tweets. At the BBC, the “radio alert transmission system” (Rats), will be activated – a cold war-era alarm designed to withstand an attack on the nation’s infrastructure. Rats, which is also sometimes referred to as “royal about to snuff it”, is a near mythical part of the intricate architecture of ritual and rehearsals for the death of major royal personalities that the BBC has maintained since the 1930s. Most staff have only ever seen it work in tests; many have never seen it work at all. “Whenever there is a strange noise in the newsroom, someone always asks, ‘Is that the Rats?’ Because we don’t know what it sounds like,” one regional reporter told me.



All news organisations will scramble to get films on air and obituaries online. At the Guardian, the deputy editor has a list of prepared stories pinned to his wall. The Times is said to have 11 days of coverage ready to go. At Sky News and ITN, which for years rehearsed the death of the Queen substituting the name “Mrs Robinson”, calls will go out to royal experts who have already signed contracts to speak exclusively on those channels. “I am going to be sitting outside the doors of the Abbey on a hugely enlarged trestle table commentating to 300 million Americans about this,” one told me.

For people stuck in traffic, or with Heart FM on in the background, there will only be the subtlest of indications, at first, that something is going on.Britain’s commercial radio stations have a network of blue “obit lights”, which is tested once a week and supposed to light up in the event of a national catastrophe. When the news breaks, these lights will start flashing, to alert DJs to switch to the news in the next few minutes and to play inoffensive music in the meantime. Every station, down to hospital radio, has prepared music lists made up of “Mood 2” (sad) or “Mood 1” (saddest) songs to reach for in times of sudden mourning. “If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on,” wrote Chris Price, a BBC radio producer, for the Huffington Post in 2011. “Something terrible has just happened.”

Having plans in place for the death of leading royals is a practice that makes some journalists uncomfortable. “There is one story which is deemed to be so much more important than others,” one former Today programme producer complained to me. For 30 years, BBC news teams were hauled to work on quiet Sunday mornings to perform mock storylines about the Queen Mother choking on a fishbone. There was once a scenario about Princess Diana dying in a car crash on the M4.

These well-laid plans have not always helped. In 2002, when the Queen Mother died, the obit lights didn’t come on because someone failed to push the button down properly. On the BBC, Peter Sissons, the veteran anchor, was criticised for wearing a maroon tie. Sissons was the victim of a BBC policy change, issued after the September 11 attacks, to moderate its coverage and reduce the number of “category one” royals eligible for the full obituary procedure. The last words in Sissons’s ear before going on air were: “Don’t go overboard. She’s a very old woman who had to go some time.”

But there will be no extemporising with the Queen. The newsreaders will wear black suits and black ties. Category one was made for her. Programmes will stop. Networks will merge. BBC 1, 2 and 4 will be interrupted and revert silently to their respective idents – an exercise class in a village hall, a swan waiting on a pond – before coming together for the news. Listeners to Radio 4 and Radio 5 live will hear a specific formulation of words, “This is the BBC from London,” which, intentionally or not, will summon a spirit of national emergency.

The main reason for rehearsals is to have words that are roughly approximate to the moment. “It is with the greatest sorrow that we make the following announcement,” said John Snagge, the BBC presenter who informed the world of the death of George VI. (The news was repeated seven times, every 15 minutes, and then the BBC went silent for five hours). According to one former head of BBC news, a very similar set of words will be used for the Queen. The rehearsals for her are different to the other members of the family, he explained. People become upset, and contemplate the unthinkable oddness of her absence. “She is the only monarch that most of us have ever known,” he said. The royal standard will appear on the screen. The national anthem will play. You will remember where you were.

I'm actually familiar with London Bridge, as I'm a (small) part of it. I've been having planning meetings about it since ~2016/7, if I remember correctly.

I may find the concept of a royal family repugnant, but it's part of my job to make sure my part of London Bridge goes to plan- for those who care about such things.

[EvoUK]

It will probably give Truss a boost in the polls, at least temporarily. I'll wager Boris will be fuming that he has missed out on being centre stage!

Small mercies - his narcissistic unhappiness with missing out will at least give me some comfort.

However, does that mean we will not be getting the fifth series of the Royal soap The Crown on Netflix?

We were both looking forward to that in order to while away a winter evening.

I've never seen it, so it depends where it is up to... will it end on a cliff-hanger, do you think?

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

Reading this, I did think it a tad premature: For those who may not know, Huw Edwards is a BBC "news anchor". My emphasis.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...-queens-health

The BBC has suspended programming on its main channel to move to blanket news coverage as concerns grow about the Queen’s medical condition.

BBC One, the most popular channel in the UK, interrupted Bargain Hunt just after 12.30pm to deliver a statement from Buckingham Palace which said that doctors are “concerned” for her health.

The 96-year-old, who broke with tradition to remain at her summer home of Balmoral to greet the new prime minister, Liz Truss, earlier this week, has been suffering from “episodic mobility problems” since last year.

BBC One has switched to a BBC News Special until at least 6pm, when the corporation’s evening news programme airs, which is being led by presenter Huw Edwards.

Edwards is dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and black tie – in line with the corporation’s on-air dress code when a royal family member dies as a mark of respect.

The poor old lady is not officially dead yet!

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

For those who are interested - and this is what The Guardian terms the long read - this is [at least some] of what Britain can look forward to. It was published in 2017 so the reference to the PM as "she" referred to Theresa May not the present incumbent, Liz Truss

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...-london-bridge

In the plans that exist for the death of the Queen – and there are many versions, held by Buckingham Palace, the government and the BBC – most envisage that she will die after a short illness. Her family and doctors will be there. When the Queen Mother passed away on the afternoon of Easter Saturday, in 2002, at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, she had time to telephone friends to say goodbye, and to give away some of her horses. In these last hours, the Queen’s senior doctor, a gastroenterologist named Professor Huw Thomas, will be in charge. He will look after his patient, control access to her room and consider what information should be made public. The bond between sovereign and subjects is a strange and mostly unknowable thing. A nation’s life becomes a person’s, and then the string must break.

There will be bulletins from the palace – not many, but enough. “The Queen is suffering from great physical prostration, accompanied by symptoms which cause much anxiety,” announced Sir James Reid, Queen Victoria’s physician, two days before her death in 1901. “The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close,” was the final notice issued by George V’s doctor,Lord Dawson, at 9.30pm on the night of 20 January 1936. Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine – enough to kill him twice over – in order to ease the monarch’s suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.

Her eyes will be closed and Charles will be king. His siblings will kiss his hands. The first official to deal with the news will be Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, a former diplomat who was given a second knighthood in 2014, in part for planning her succession.
Geidt will contact the prime minister. The last time a British monarch died, 65 years ago, the demise of George VI was conveyed in a code word, “Hyde Park Corner”, to Buckingham Palace, to prevent switchboard operators from finding out. For Elizabeth II, the plan for what happens next is known as “London Bridge.” The prime minister will be woken, if she is not already awake, and civil servants will say “London Bridge is down” on secure lines. From the Foreign Office’s Global Response Centre, at an undisclosed location in the capital, the news will go out to the 15 governments outside the UK where the Queen is also the head of state, and the 36 other nations of the Commonwealth for whom she has served as a symbolic figurehead – a face familiar in dreams and the untidy drawings of a billion schoolchildren – since the dawn of the atomic age.

For a time, she will be gone without our knowing it. The information will travel like the compressional wave ahead of an earthquake, detectable only by special equipment. Governors general, ambassadors and prime ministers will learn first. Cupboards will be opened in search of black armbands, three-and-a-quarter inches wide, to be worn on the left arm.

The rest of us will find out more quickly than before. On 6 February 1952, George VI was found by his valet at Sandringham at 7.30am. The BBC did not broadcast the news until 11.15am, almost four hours later. When Princess Diana died at 4am local time at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris on 31 August 1997, journalists accompanying the former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, on a visit to the Philippines knew within 15 minutes. For many years the BBC was told about royal deaths first, but its monopoly on broadcasting to the empire has gone now. When the Queen dies, the announcement will go out as a newsflash to the Press Association and the rest of the world’s media simultaneously. At the same instant, a footman in mourning clothes will emerge from a door at Buckingham Palace, cross the dull pink gravel and pin a black-edged notice to the gates. While he does this, the palace website will be transformed into a sombre, single page, showing the same text on a dark background.

Screens will glow. There will be tweets. At the BBC, the “radio alert transmission system” (Rats), will be activated – a cold war-era alarm designed to withstand an attack on the nation’s infrastructure. Rats, which is also sometimes referred to as “royal about to snuff it”, is a near mythical part of the intricate architecture of ritual and rehearsals for the death of major royal personalities that the BBC has maintained since the 1930s. Most staff have only ever seen it work in tests; many have never seen it work at all. “Whenever there is a strange noise in the newsroom, someone always asks, ‘Is that the Rats?’ Because we don’t know what it sounds like,” one regional reporter told me.



All news organisations will scramble to get films on air and obituaries online. At the Guardian, the deputy editor has a list of prepared stories pinned to his wall. The Times is said to have 11 days of coverage ready to go. At Sky News and ITN, which for years rehearsed the death of the Queen substituting the name “Mrs Robinson”, calls will go out to royal experts who have already signed contracts to speak exclusively on those channels. “I am going to be sitting outside the doors of the Abbey on a hugely enlarged trestle table commentating to 300 million Americans about this,” one told me.

For people stuck in traffic, or with Heart FM on in the background, there will only be the subtlest of indications, at first, that something is going on.Britain’s commercial radio stations have a network of blue “obit lights”, which is tested once a week and supposed to light up in the event of a national catastrophe. When the news breaks, these lights will start flashing, to alert DJs to switch to the news in the next few minutes and to play inoffensive music in the meantime. Every station, down to hospital radio, has prepared music lists made up of “Mood 2” (sad) or “Mood 1” (saddest) songs to reach for in times of sudden mourning. “If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on,” wrote Chris Price, a BBC radio producer, for the Huffington Post in 2011. “Something terrible has just happened.”

Having plans in place for the death of leading royals is a practice that makes some journalists uncomfortable. “There is one story which is deemed to be so much more important than others,” one former Today programme producer complained to me. For 30 years, BBC news teams were hauled to work on quiet Sunday mornings to perform mock storylines about the Queen Mother choking on a fishbone. There was once a scenario about Princess Diana dying in a car crash on the M4.

These well-laid plans have not always helped. In 2002, when the Queen Mother died, the obit lights didn’t come on because someone failed to push the button down properly. On the BBC, Peter Sissons, the veteran anchor, was criticised for wearing a maroon tie. Sissons was the victim of a BBC policy change, issued after the September 11 attacks, to moderate its coverage and reduce the number of “category one” royals eligible for the full obituary procedure. The last words in Sissons’s ear before going on air were: “Don’t go overboard. She’s a very old woman who had to go some time.”

But there will be no extemporising with the Queen. The newsreaders will wear black suits and black ties. Category one was made for her. Programmes will stop. Networks will merge. BBC 1, 2 and 4 will be interrupted and revert silently to their respective idents – an exercise class in a village hall, a swan waiting on a pond – before coming together for the news. Listeners to Radio 4 and Radio 5 live will hear a specific formulation of words, “This is the BBC from London,” which, intentionally or not, will summon a spirit of national emergency.

The main reason for rehearsals is to have words that are roughly approximate to the moment. “It is with the greatest sorrow that we make the following announcement,” said John Snagge, the BBC presenter who informed the world of the death of George VI. (The news was repeated seven times, every 15 minutes, and then the BBC went silent for five hours). According to one former head of BBC news, a very similar set of words will be used for the Queen. The rehearsals for her are different to the other members of the family, he explained. People become upset, and contemplate the unthinkable oddness of her absence. “She is the only monarch that most of us have ever known,” he said. The royal standard will appear on the screen. The national anthem will play. You will remember where you were.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

Great, I can't wait for the months-long forced mourning our country is going to have to go through now. Also can't wait for this being the cover for more awful Tory proposals being forced through parliament.

It will probably give Truss a boost in the polls, at least temporarily. I'll wager Boris will be fuming that he has missed out on being centre stage!

However, does that mean we will not be getting the fifth series of the Royal soap The Crown on Netflix?

We were both looking forward to that in order to while away a winter evening.

[EvoUK]

Great, I can't wait for the months-long forced mourning our country is going to have to go through now. Also can't wait for this being the cover for more awful Tory proposals being forced through parliament.

[CivilDiscourse]

It is going to be the end of an era. My hope is that Harry makes it on time.

[Reepicheep]

I saw (to use her official Canadian title) Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. several times when she visited Victoria, BC in 2002. She attended an Anglican church service on Sunday morning, and since the church was located only two blocks from my apartment I went to the church and watched her arrive (her arrival at the church was preceded by a minute or two by a car carrying four very, very large men who did a quick check before the queen arrived; I later learned that the four men were members of JTF 2, Canada's special forces unit).

My most interesting glimpse occurred 90 minutes later. My place of employment was two blocks south of the church, so after catching a glimpse of the Queen I went to work. After the church service, she was scheduled to head to the legislature, and I knew her most likely motorcade route was directly in front of my building. When I heard police sirens, I went outside to the street, and a minute later her motorcade went by. There were no other onlookers within a block of me, and when her car went by she happened to be sitting on the side of the car that was facing me. Her car window was open, and she made eye contact with me and gave me the famous "Queen wave", so for a few seconds I was the object of her undivided attention.

I hadn't been so excited since the time the science fiction author Isaac Asimov entered a washroom in the Anaheim Convention Center and used the urinal beside the one that I was using. But that's a tale for another time...

God Save the Queen,

[rogue06]

I wish the Queen a speedy recovery.

Live coverage from the BBC.

The NYT is also providing live coverage (it updated as I wrote this)