Emergency meeting called at Buckingham Palace

[IceAgeComing]

Its all a bit silly really, they basically have two plans for the Queen: one if she goes peacefully after an illness and another if, god forbid, something more like Diana happened where it is news as soon as it happens and they can't really embargo anything.  There's a really interesting Guardian article I read a while back which basically goes into detail about how the broadcasters have planned for it: to the point where they actually rehearse bits of the broadcast (which almost went dodgy after a BBC journalist got confused and tweeted about the Queen being very ill when she really wasn't).  The best bit of the whole rather grim business is that if she died on Christmas Day (or probably really late Christmas Eve, thinking about it); the plan seems to be to embargo the news until Boxing Day just to not dampen that day for people.  I means news would leak out now; but the thought is there I suppose...

There's also an interesting article I read somewhere from someone who was a radio DJ on the overnight show when the whole thing with Diana was going on basically about how the entire station was totally unprepared - the protocol said that they were to carry on as normal until they were told through the system that they have set up for an announcement of that nature (there is seriously an entire system for all of the radio stations to let them know that a major royal has died - they've only ever actually used it for Diana: it didn't really work when the Queen Mother died since the person in charge of pressing the two buttons that needed to be pushed to set the whole thing off only pressed one: so some stations went into the news without knowing and then had to very quickly check upcoming songs to make sure that they were... appropriate) then play 'appropriate music' (read very sad, bad ballads or classical music) until the news, then play the national anthem, and then play the tape that they had set aside just in case something like that happened.  However, when they got the stuff out they found out that the National Anthem was on an ancient tape format that they had stopped using ten years earlier and the reel to reel tape (in 1997!) that they were supposed to use was full of incredibly old jingles, for some reason.  It actually led to everyone having a rethink since most stations went off script because they weren't prepared, or didn't know the procedure because they'd never had to do it before - everything being computerised helps since it means that they would just need to change playlists; but you can guarantee that any mistake and you'd have the Daily Mail writing articles for the next century about "THE BBC DON'T RESPECT THE MONARCHY!!!".

I don't know if this interests anyone; I don't know why I know all of this...