I wake up this morning, but the TV on and see Victoria Derbyshire spending 10 minutes waffling on about Strictly with Len Goodman, only finding out Stephen Hawking had died when it finally scrolled across the bottom of the screen. This is one of the reasons I can't stand the VD show.
This is a bit unfair. Len Goodman was on Victoria Derbyshire at 9.55. The news of Stephen Hawking's death broke overnight, so BBC News had been covering it since at least 6am, and sad story though it was, I don't think it deserved to be getting continuous rolling coverage some four hours later. For the vast majority of the audience, that would have been old news. It's a shame if you hadn't heard it by then but I'm not sure BBC News can be held responsible for that. You'd have certainly seen it on the ticker several times within that ten minutes.
They were giving it plenty of coverage at the top of the hour. At 10am they were playing his obituary and had long interviews. But I don't know what you were expecting at five minutes to the hour. Every hour on BBC News, Sky News and all other channels do the lighter items at that time. Len Goodman wasn't on there to talk about Strictly - he was there because he's fronting a campaign to stop old people being scammed. Not the most exciting story, I grant you, but a viable news story and I would certainly suggest of more importance than most of the stories you would get at five minutes to the hour on a news channel. On Fridays the News at Five devotes the last fifteen minutes of the hour to The Film Review, for example.
Besides, if you'd switched on exactly an hour earlier you wouldn't have heard much coverage because they were doing Business Live, and if you'd switched to Sky News you wouldn't have heard much coverage because they'd have been doing All Out Politics.
You can hardly take issue with Victoria Derbyshire because you tuned it at five to the hour and they weren't talking about the top story. Unless it's a major story no news channel does that in any hour. It's like complaining News at Ten didn't cover the top story because you switched on when they were doing the And Finally.
The Derbyshire programme covers breaking news, when it breaks. But this wasn't breaking news. It was several hours old.