Duke of hazard for the BBC

DID the BBC go over the top with its coverage of the death of Prince Philip?

Over 100,000 people thought so as they complained to the corporation.

Many more, including me, thought that, on balance, they probably went a bit too far. Don’t get we wrong, I’m a royalist and I was a big fan of the Duke of Edinburgh. He represented an apolitical institution which, while it may not be perfect, had glued together our nation through turbulent times in the world. Bringing politics into our choice of head of state opens up a real can of worms, you can get power-mad people like Putin, Trump, and Erdogan in charge. But back to the BBC and I felt that running the same programmes mourning the duke’s death simultaneously on both One and Two, together with the shutting down of Four, was a misjudgement.

For a start, Britain is a muchchanged society and we have to accept that there are those not that interested in wall-to-wall coverage of the demise of a royal. And even traditionalists like me were eventually looking for some alternative to hour upon hour of tributes and analysis. Perhaps the most telling statistic was that the most watched programme on the Friday night was Gogglebox on Channel 4.