[thegeek]

Similar to Orry, I was in an MCR for a broadcaster that wasn't going to be throwing to rolling news, but was certainly going to have to change its output come the announcement. I think I was one of the only people in the engineering team who'd previously taken enough of an interest to have asked for the obituary procedure*, so by early afternoon had forwarded it on to a few people while we got the latest version from the higher-ups, and stuck BBC One up on the monitor stack. We didn't have any inside knowledge, but I did just happen to have the sound turned up at the right time to hear Huw's announcement.

I'm quite glad to have been there to see the plan swing into action - and then rapidly evolve. Adverts were dropped straight away and replaced with a generic channel promo, which was itself swiftly deemed to be inappropriately jaunty, and swapped out for some improvised captions over a static logo, and programmes were being truncated all over the place because the production teams thought it would be more appropriate to do so.

I then managed to miss out on most of the weekend's coverage by disappearing off to Amsterdam for the weekend, though IBC was quite a good place for gossip about who knew what and when.

* my very first time on the air on student radio was an hour after Princess Margaret's death was announced, so it's the kind of thing that's always been at the back of my mind.