How well did the BBC cover the death of the Queen?

The death of the Queen at 96 was hardly unexpected. Unlike the death of Diana, it did not catch the media unawares. Indeed, the BBC have been preparing for the monarch’s death for years, down to the smallest detail. At what point should newsreaders wear black ties? (There was some confusion on this point. Huw Edwards, the BBC’s main presenter, wore a black tie even before the Queen’s death was formally announced; the Royal Correspondent, Nicholas Witchell, did not.) Should the national anthem be played when the news of her death was announced? (It was). Should BBC1 be cleared for 24-hour news coverage? (It was). Should there be comedy programmes and what about the Last Night of the Proms? (The former were not shown and the latter was cancelled.)

And yet despite the endless preparations the BBC’s coverage was a very mixed bag. At its best it was superbly professional. On BBC1 Huw Edwards, Clive Myrie, Alan Little and Sophie Rayworth were among those who rose to the occasion. Huw Edwards, in particular, not only had to announce the Queen’s death but he fronted the coverage on BBC1 and the BBC News Channel, ably assisted by Nicolas Witchell, for hours. On Radio 4 Evan Davis, Mishal Husain and Jim Naughtie were just as good: calm, authoritative, always clear.

The BBC coverage was at its best when there was real news to report. They did a fine job of reporting the Queen’s death and who was arriving at Balmoral and when and of covering the new King’s arrival at Buckingham Palace. The proclamation of King Charles’s accession on Saturday morning was handled excellently: full of interesting information, a good panel of experts, the right mix of constitutional experts, historians and royal biographers. The coverage of moving the Queen’s coffin from Balmoral to Edinburgh was deeply moving.

What was really surprising, though, was how much the BBC got wrong and the strange feeling of panic and uncertainty that ran through much of its coverage. Of course, the Last Night of the Proms should not have been cancelled. Think of the moving Last Night of the Proms after 9/11, a powerful tribute to all those who had died. A suitably diverse group of soloists, a packed crowd singing Rule Britannia and other patriotic songs, plus some British classics by Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams, would surely have been a fitting tribute to Queen Elizabeth II. How could this possibly have been seen as disrespectful to her memory?

The panic is more interesting. Radio 4 was confident and sure of itself, from the Today programme to the moving interview with Terry Waite on Saturday Live about his stay at Balmoral soon after his release after five years of solitary confinement. Best of all, Jim Naughtie presented a superb two-hour documentary about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth, packed full of information and a fascinating selection of interviewees, especially the historian Sir David Cannadine, who did a wonderful job of evoking how different Britain was when the Queen came to the throne seventy years ago. Clear, thoughtful history at its very best. Radio 4 knew what kind of tone to strike and what its listeners expected.

BBC1, by contrast, often seemed unsure who its audience was and what they wanted. Some of its coverage seemed terrified of being too clever or too highbrow and out of touch with its viewers. So, it preferred interviews with Gyles Brandreth, journalists, middlebrow royal biographers and minor academics rather than prominent British historians like Cannadine or Simon Schama. No Linda Colley or RJ Evans, no Andrew Roberts or Lawrence Goldman (former Oxford historian and editor of the ODNB and a regular on In Our Time on Radio 4).

Part of the problem was not being sure of the tone to strike. Another problem was the sheer number of hours that needed filling, But surely BBC executives had anticipated this problem with all those endless rehearsals? What would they do with all that airtime, especially when they had cancelled everything else? Saturday night was a perfect example of what BBC1 could show: a fascinating documentary about the Queen’s unseen photographs and archive film first show for the Platinum Jubilee and another about the Queen’s radio and TV broadcasts over the years.

Why had they not prepared long thoughtful documentary series, filled with archive, stills and interviews with people who knew the Queen and who knew their British history? Where were the cultural critics who could have discussed how the British monarchy was reinvented in the Queen’s reign? Who was the driving force behind that reinvention — the Queen herself, Prince Philip, or royal advisers and senior civil servants at the Palace or in Whitehall? Who advised the Queen to move Britain from an imperial power to transform the Commonwealth, still relatively new when she came to the throne, or to embrace a new multi-cultural, multi-racial Britain so different from 1920s Britain where she was born? It is one thing to say Britain changed unrecognisably since 1952, but it is quite another to trace these changes and explain who was responsible for making sure the monarchy changed with them, rather than being left out of touch, some fusty relic from the time of George V and his son George VI?

This was a terrific opportunity for the BBC to make a real contribution to explaining the Queen’s real impact and how both monarchy and nation changed so dramatically. It was often mentioned that her first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was born in 1874, whereas her last Prime Minister, Liz Truss, was born in 1975, the year Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party. It’s not hard to have a sense of the huge changes in British society during that century. But the monarchy could have been left behind, unable to adapt.

Instead, there was the Queen with James Bond in 2012, evoking Vera Lynn during Covid and with Paddington Bear and Elton John during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations. She seemed remarkably in touch with modern Britain, despite the headscarves and clipped posh tones. She had an extraordinary connection with the war generation and for many she was a living link with the war years. But she was also hugely popular with the young. She and the monarchy adapted, just as it did under Victoria (a fascinating story brilliantly told by David Cannadine in his essay, “The context, performance and meaning of ritual: the British monarchy and the ‘invention of tradition’, c. 1820-1977”, in The Invention of Tradition).

These questions were rarely asked because BBC executives were running scared. They were worried they might seem too remote, too highbrow. But surely there was room in this rolling news coverage for some serious analysis of why exactly the Queen was so important. We heard so many times how funny and kind she was, how devoted to service and how humble. All doubtless true. But that won’t be her historical legacy. Her importance lay in her ability to move with the times and to help the monarchy change when Britain was changing so quickly around it.

There were moments, obviously at Diana’s death, when it looked as if the monarchy was out of touch. But within a few years, the Queen was more popular than ever. Those extraordinarily powerful moments of reconciliation, such as her visits to Germany in 1965, to Ireland in 2011, or to India in 1997, embodied a new relationship to the past, acknowledging what imperial Britain had got wrong. Often it was just about making the right gesture: shaking hands with Martin McGuinness, laying a wreath at Amritsar. She was not a great orator like her first Prime Minister. But so often she caught the mood perfectly with a simple gesture or a phrase like: “We will meet again”.

There was so much to be said about the Queen, the monarchy and modern Britain. And too often it was left unsaid out of a kind of panic that has seized the BBC in recent years. I do hope Tim Davie, the Director-General, will tell his executives to show more courage, to make programmes that appeal to many kinds of viewers and listeners. Otherwise, like the monarchy in the 1950s, the BBC faces a crisis of growing irrelevance.

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