Operation London Bridge: the death of the Queen

Same here, actually! I was our newsreader, and got the call to come and do a safe, gentle show that morning. We had a new library card-operated lock on our studios, though, and thankfully our programme controller happened to be in stupidly early that morning, and a) locked the door to non-news types, and b) pulled a load of safe songs out of the record library, and just had me pop up every fifteen minutes between songs to report the news, until lunchtime, by which time it was clear it wasn't too big a story, and normal programming could resume.

From Wikipedia's article on the 1997-98 English Football season

There was a stink with the Scottish FA: it wasn't all straight forward.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/diana/soccer.html

Radio 1's coverage of Diana's death was discussed earlier in this thread and there was a mention of Capital. I remember that most of the music on Capital's obit playlist came from the Pure Moods collection - Kenny G, Ryuichi Sakamoto, etc.

Here's a clip from the day Diana died of how the GWR network of stations handled things, recorded from Wyvern FM with Robert Kenny presenting http://aircheckdownloads.com/Wyvern_RobertKenny_31Aug97.mp3. Interesting how it differed from Capital as they played non-instrumental songs.

There's an interesting blog post on how one overnight jock handled the Diana obit here

http://ruddmakesense.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/death-of-princess.html

From the MHP page:


"Meanwhile, all independent radio stations were taking the IRN special programme, which consisted of light instrumental music and ten minute announcements, with extended news bulletins on the hour and half-hour.

London’s Capital Radio (95.8 FM and Gold 1548) dropped out of the IRN coverage fairly quickly, partly due to the poor quality of their feed, which had sounded like a telephone payphone with beeps over the music. They broadcast a combined programme of light classical music with Howard Hughes announcing every ten minutes."

Indeed one of the songs from the clip is a Kenny G number

One problem that some smaller stations had was that the IRN bulletins were extended from 2 to 3 minutes, but their automation was still expecting 2. I remember tuning around and hearing my small local station cutting off the news suddenly with a cheery jingle overnight

That's a great read -, some of his other posts include how he was on air finishing a football OB shortly before the Queen Mother's death was announced, and in another a back-up CD triggering during a Remembrance Day silence.

I seem to remember hearing Kenny G on the radio in Glasgow too - though don't recall it being poor quality, so perhaps Clyde 1 were just running a similar playlist. (It may also have been a rare - for the time - example of SRH networking their stations during the day, as I distinctly remember Craig Wallace reeling off all the stations in the group, though I may be confusing that with the day the Queen Mum died)

The IRN line by then (1997) was satellite delivered I think. It wasn't like the dark days of the 70s and 80s, where
it was a load of BT EPS98 (?) 10kHz landlines that leap frogged from ILR station to ILR station, and once you were 200 miles from London sounded dreadful. It must have been a low bandwidth sat channel, so would have sounded just as crap wherever it was being received in the UK !

I remember Capital FM playing classical music at about 8am that day; hearing that finally confirmed for me that the news wasn't a big hoax...

I was working that Sunday, so my radio-alarm went off at 06:25. It was tuned to an RSL station, that was due to close down at midnight on that day. I came to, and my first thought was the radio had drifted onto Radio 3, then I thought it can't have done (the RSL was up at 107 MHz I think) Then a voice came on, said it was the emergency IRN service (at which point I thought we were at war) and announced the news. I grabbed the TV remote to put the TV on, just in time to catch the BBC logo (and ' This is BBC Television from London announcement into the obit programme at 06:30)