Dermot: ‘We’ve never seen the like of this. It is monumental’
BROADCASTER Dermot Murnaghan has revealed his personal struggle to announce the death of Queen Elizabeth on TV, after his own mother’s funeral just days earlier.
Viewers noticed that Dermot left a long pause in the middle of the heart-breaking announcement on Sky News.
“It was a very strange personal moment for me,” he revealed.
“Just the week before, on the first of September – seared in my memory – it was my mother’s funeral.
“Precisely that time of day, seven days earlier, I’d been reading a eulogy for my mother. She was old, she passed, she was much loved. A week later, I’m announcing to the nation that the Queen is dead.”
He said that even after 38 years in the job, the news caught him by surprise.
“There was a moment, just when I was reading it out... it just kind of caught. I thought, ‘No, people want to know.’ So you know, when I said, ‘the Queen has died peacefully at Balmoral’, I actually just paused. I thought, ‘Let’s take this in. I’m not going to hurry through this.’”
He recalled how, 25 years earlier, he announced the death of Princess Diana.
“We’d seen on Saturday this vibrant princess, diving off the back of yachts and enjoying herself in the south of France, then turning up to the Ritz for dinner. Then suddenly to go from that to, by 6am, and she’s unfortunately died in a car accident. That’s the difference.
“With Her Majesty, two days before, she looked, yes, a very old woman, and the fact that she passed is terribly, terribly sad, but it’s not that sense of shock.”
As Dermot, 64, spoke on Thursday, he was having a rare day off.
“I had worked 10 days on the trot after standing in Downing Street for the new Prime Minister.that seems ancient history now.”
He says he is no adrenaline junkie when it comes to breaking news and prefers to remain tranquil, despite the buzz.
He said: “I go quite zen. It’s just ‘calm yourself’.you’re announcing enormous news and it’s not about what you think.”
As for tomorrow’s funeral, all the main broadcasters, he said, are pooling their resources. “There’s no point having four media organisations having a camera in the same spot.”
The crowds will be huge, he said, with millions likely to be following the state hearse’s progress to Windsor, “plus a TV audience in the billions”.
He added: “I guess you could say I have this front row seat at the making of history.these are moments when, if the hairs don’t stand up on the back of your neck, I don’t think you’re a sentient human being.”
He said it would take time for him to absorb what has happened.
“It’s the end of an era. It’s the beginning of a new era. As a nation we’re in this transitional phase. That’s where the shock comes.
“It’s when it sinks in because we almost factored in that the Queen was always there. Now she’s not. I think the week is going to be quite weird. Monday will be an incredible spectacle.
“We’ve not seen the like of this in the United Kingdom. I was a very small boy for the state funeral of Winston Churchill. Still, this is nothing like that.this is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the end of the second Elizabethan age.
“It is monumental.”