BBC Viewers Complain About Wall-to-Wall Prince Philip Death

[Mark Jeffries]

When the announcement was made around noontime Friday, the Beeb followed past tradition, played "God Save the Queen" on all of its adult channels (not CBBC or Ceebeebies) before announcing the death of the Duke of Edinburgh and then simulcast news and tributes to Philip on BBC1, BBC2 and BBC News the rest of the day (with digital culture channel BBC4 not even signing on)--over 100K people swamped the switchboard and web sites, unhappy about pre-emptions of "EastEnders" and the season finale of their "MasterChef":

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bbc-receives-over-100000-complaints-over-prince-philip-coverage

Schedules were back to normal Saturday, in time for the live coverage of night 1 of the BAFTA film awards (and who was the idiot who thought that Radio 1 DJs should be hosts in the footsteps of Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley and Graham Norton?).  For the record, the previous record angry response to BBC programming was the 63K complaints over "Jerry Springer:  The Opera" in January 2005.

[Tom Wolper]

It's odd when a news story brings a buried podcast memory. In this case it's a February 2018 episode of the Omnibus Project podcast hosted by Ken Jennings and John Roderick called "London Bridge is Down." It's a code message sent out to British broadcasters on the death of the monarch (or perhaps any close family members, I just don't remember). When the code is given there's a whole protocol of what has to be broadcast and when. I don't think the BBC had any choice to cover the royal death any differently than they did.

https://www.omnibusproject.com/27