The Mourning After

Viewers were left astounded during TV coverage of the death of Prince Philip to see two newsreaders come to blows, live on air, apparently over the issue of who was mourning more over the Royal death. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” says Alistair Juggs, TV critic of tabloid the Daily Norks, who was watching digital channel ‘Firmament News’ at the time. “It happened as one of their anchors – Jocelyn Panns – was interviewing a former boy scout about the amusing time the late Duke of Edinburgh had directed a string of expletives at him when he spilled tea on the Duke during a Royal visit to his Scout camp. You could see her co-anchor – Christopher Potts – fuming at her in the background, apparently feeling that she wasn’t being obsequious enough.” The trigger for the incident appeared to come when Panns seemed to cast doubt on the guest’s claims that the abuse he received was amusing – at this point Potts shouted “For God’s sake show some respect, you fat bitch! The man has just died! Her Majesty doesn’t want to hear you trying to imply her dead husband was some kind of foul mouthed old bigot!” A furious Panns responded in kind, shouting back, “At least I could be bothered to wear black – the best you could manage was that bloody armband, which we all know is just one of your socks tied around your arm!”. Potts then hurled his chair at his co-host, missing her and hitting the former boy scout. Panns, in turn, punched him in the mouth, before the channel abruptly switched to a live outside broadcast from Buckingham Palace.

According to Juggs, this wasn’t the first such incident to have occurred at Firmament News that day. “I’ve been reliably informed that when news of the Duke’s death came over the wire, there was an unseemly rush amongst the duty newsreaders as to was going to announce it on air,” he claims. “By all accounts it nearly turned into a mass brawl, with punches thrown and frenzied scrabble to try and get into the hot seat.” There are even claims that one presenter launched a flying drop kick at the newsreader who had managed to get into the newsdesk chair just before the cameras switched to them for the announcement, in one last desperate attempt to dislodge them. He missed, however, knocking the weather girl off of her feet instead and wrecking the weather map. “People don’t realise just how competitive the news reading game is,” explains Juggs. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Believe me, if you don’t get to be seen breaking the big headlines on a regular basis, then your star can quickly fall and you’ll find yourself doing the weather on some tinpot local station. So, there is fierce rivalry when it comes to announcing big name deaths. After what we witnessed on the day of Prince Philip’s death, I fear that when the Queen herself finally pops her clogs herself, we will see a bloodbath in Britain’s news rooms!” Hitting the right tone, Juggs points out, is seen as crucial when presenting such stories. “You have to pander to both audiences and politicians so as to appear suitably respectful,” he says. “Which is why they all try to outdo each other with sycophancy when presenting the obituaries of the great and the good and wear the appropriate attire for mourning our masters. You see the same thing every November in the run up to Remembrance Day when they seem to be competing as to who is wearing the biggest poppy.”

But with the BBC and other TV companies having received record complaints as to the extent of their coverage of Prince Philip’s death, there seems to have been a shift in public opinion with regard to the way in which such events are covered by the media. “Many of the complaints focused not just on what was seen as the over kill of the coverage, with every BBC channel showing the same news report for the better part of a day, but also the overly reverential tone of it,” opines Charles Cupper, Media Correspondent for the Sunday Bystander. “People just aren’t the forelock tugging Royal subjects they were when the guidelines for this sort of coverage was drawn up in the nineteen fifties – people like to see themselves as citizens now and want to believe that we live in a more egalitarian society, rather than one where we all have to go into mourning, speak in hushed tones and wear sack cloth for a week every time the member of a family of unelected hereditary rulers dies.” Cupper also highlights the problems inherent in having to fill seemingly endless hours of air time with content under such circumstances. “There’s only a certain number of ways in which you can say that someone has died – it quickly becomes repetitive,” he says. “The fact is that a death isn’t really a developing story – unless, of course, that foul play is suspected. Which probably explains why, toward the end of the coverage that day, we started to see some news services desperately wheeling on conspiracy theorists to try and pad out their programmes.”

In particular, he singles out, once again, Firmament News, which, late at night, brought on notorious conspiracy theorist Martin Grill to discuss his ‘theory’ that the 99 year old Duke – who had been in poor health for some time – had actually been assassinated in order to divert public attention from other news stories. “Boris Johnson smothered him with a pillow to try and draw attention away from the Brexit-inspired violence in Northern Ireland that the UK press had finally started reporting,” he declared. “He was seen shinning down a drainpipe round the back of Windsor Castle in the early hours of the morning – either he had just done in the duke or he’d been illicitly porking one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Or maybe both.” Thankfully, by this time Firmament’s viewing figures were down to single figures, so few people witnessed this bout of insanity. Even fewer witnessed a response from a Daily Excess reporter who dismissed the theory, instead claiming that Prince Philip had obviously been murdered by Meghan Markle.

Nevertheless, despite the widespread complaints as to the volume and tone of the coverage, there are still some who feel that the British media didn’t feature enough tributes to the Duke, with regulator OFCOM receiving particularly irate letter from a retired colonel compaining that, several days after Prince Philip’s death, he’d tuned in to Talking Pictures TV, to find The Mummy’s Shroud playing. “I find it extraordinary that a film featuring a living mummy going around murdering people in the most horrendous ways should be being screened during this week of national mourning,” he wrote. “Particularly in view of the reports in the Daily Excess that Prince Philip was strangled to death in his bed by an Egyptian mummy revived by Meghan Markle, who is actually the reincarnation of an Ancient Egyptian High Priestess. Quite frankly, all British broadcasters should have been shut down or forced to show nothing but respectful tributes to the Duke for the entire period of mourning!”