[Transmission]

Apologies if this has already been touched upon, but having thought back to how the media reacted to the news-before-the-news, would BBC One, ITV and C5 have gone into rolling news mode if they didn't know the Queen's demise was imminent?

I know BBC One, at least, started to simulcast BBC News at least a couple of hours before HM actually died. I just wonder how they would've justified all that coverage if it'd transpired she pulled through that day.

There were preparations for what BBC One might do if no announcement came. There was talk of attempting to get the regional news away post-7pm, though in practice I wonder if they really would have taken the risk of having to do a network recall. It was thought that if no announcement came by a certain point in the evening, nothing new would come from the palace until morning so there were constantly-changing plans about when to return to schedules. I think it was Masterchef that would have been replaced with something else because of a reference to the jubilee.

There were a number of factors as the day went on which meant the newsrooms would have been fairly confident that the news was a matter of days away if not hours. So it would have been back to rolling news the next day unless there was a significant change in the news.