Dead Pool 18th September 2022
As mentioned in last weeks telegram messages, I haven’t forgot anyone who had Marsha Hunt last week, well done all of you. The points have been updated accordingly; and talking about points, I scored again! With the assisted suicide of Jean-Luc Godard, I scored 59 points! Go me!
Look Who You Could Have Had:
- Jean-Luc Godard, 91, French-Swiss film director (Breathless, Bande à part, Pierrot le Fou), screenwriter and film critic, assisted suicide.
- Harry Landis, 90, British actor (EastEnders, Friday Night Dinner, Bitter Victory) and stage director.
- Gwyneth Powell, 76, English actress (Grange Hill, Man Down, The Guardians), complications from colon surgery.
- Ken Starr, 76, American lawyer (Whitewater controversy), complications from surgery.
- Irene Papas, 93, Greek actress (Zorba the Greek, The Guns of Navarone, Z) and singer, complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
- Henry Silva, 95, American actor (Ocean’s 11, The Manchurian Candidate, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai).
- Eddie Butler, 65, Welsh rugby union player (British & Irish Lions, Barbarian F.C., national team), commentator and journalist.
In Other News
Japan’s oldest man – who survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing and fought in World War II – has died at the age of 112, authorities announced. Mikizo Ueda died in a nursing home in Nara city of Japan on 9th September. The country which has one of the highest life expectancy rates in the world hit a record number of centenarians with an estimated 86,510 people aged 100 years or over last year, according to federal data. Japan has one of the most numbers of people who have been certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest people alive. Mikizo was born in May 1910 in Kyoto and moved to Osaka after the death of his family. He worked in the finance division of the Wakayama Prefectural Office, according to Global Super Centenarian Forum. Mikizo served in the Navy during World War II and witnessed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He was passionate about the traditional Japanese way of writing poems, known as haiku, and published book under the pseudonym Morihiko Ueda. The health ministry of Japan will now announce plans to celebrate the country’s oldest living individual, Fusa Tatsum, on 16th September, according to local media reports. Ms Fusa is a 115-year-old woman who lives in Kashiwara city, 20 kilometres away from central Osaka in Japan. The woman used to work in a family orchard where she grew plums, peaches and grapes until she was about 55 years old. She learnt to play Japan’s classical musical instrument known as an Okoto and studied flower arrangement. The death of Mikizo comes as Guinness World Records holder for the oldest living person in 2019, died in April this year at the age of 119. Kane Tanaka was living at a nursing home and was in relatively good health until recently, enjoying playing board games, solving maths problems, drinking soda and eating chocolate.
The free climber known as the “French Spiderman” has inexplicably celebrated his 60th birthday by scaling a 187-metre Paris skyscraper. Alain Robert was pictured climbing up the Tour TotalEnergies building in the La Defense business district on Saturday. Without the help of ropes or a safety harness, the idiot clung to the 48-storey tower’s window frames using only his hands, reaching the top of the building in 60 minutes. His 60th birthday was last month. The climber has conquered Tour TotalEnergies numerous times in the past. “I promised myself several years ago that when I reached 60, I would climb that tower again because 60 symbolises retirement age in France and I thought that was a nice touch,” he said. When he reached the top, he raised his arms above his head to celebrate, while those on the ground cheered. After the feat, an elated Mr Robert told the flying monkeys: “I want to send people the message that being 60 years old is nothing. You can still do sport, be active, do fabulous things.” To climb the tower, Mr Robert – who began climbing in the 1970s – had only a red jumpsuit, climbing shoes, a bottle of water, and a small bag of chalk to wipe away sweat – which could cause him to slip and fall.
On This Day
- 1879 – The Blackpool Illuminations are switched on for the first time.
- 1906 – The 1906 Hong Kong typhoon kills an estimated 10,000 people
- 1977 – Voyager I takes the first distant photograph of the Earth and the Moon together.
- 2012 – Greater Manchester Police officers PC Nicola Hughes and PC Fiona Bone are murdered in a gun and grenade ambush attack in Greater Manchester, England.
Deaths
- 1970 – Jimi Hendrix, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1942).
- 2004 – Russ Meyer, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1922).
- 2020 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg, United States Supreme Court justice (b. 1933).
Inside British newsrooms on the day Queen Elizabeth II died
If, like me, you are bored to death with all the royal coverage, you might be more interested in what happened behind the scenes prior to any announcement being made of HRH’s death.
The journey towards the1 first monarchical transition in 70 years came with the passing of a note. At 12.21pm on Thursday, as new Prime Minister Liz Truss and Labour leader Keir Starmer battled at the dispatch box over Truss’s announcement on energy bills, attention focused more on what was happening behind them.
A folded-up piece of paper was passed along both front benches, and the country knew something was up by the looks on the faces of those who read the note. “It was fucking weird because as soon as the note went round everyone kind of knew and was going: ‘She’s dead,’ right,” says one Whitehall correspondent for a national newspaper. (Like all those quoted in this story, they were given anonymity in order to speak freely.) “Then it’s been waiting and knowing without knowing, writing other stuff under the pretence it’s not all going to be scrapped.”
The correspondent was told by editors to write on the major political stories of the day – an unfunded promise to limit energy bills, the settling in of a new prime minister and the creation of her government – that they knew would never be read.
Thirteen minutes after the note came the tweet. “Following further evaluation this morning, the Queen’s doctors are concerned for Her Majesty’s health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision,” wrote Buckingham Palace. “The Queen remains comfortable and at Balmoral.”
“When the statement dropped about her health it was obvious, and suddenly no MPs would talk,” the Whitehall correspondent says. Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs stopped responding to messages.
Across at what was once known as Fleet Street, time stopped.
Unlike the April 2021 death of the Duke of Edinburgh, which was announced out of the blue, says one BBC journalist, the announcement that the Queen was “comfortable” but doctors were “concerned” was a coded message: get ready. “She obviously didn’t look well on Tuesday with Truss,” says the BBC journalist. “No idea it was imminent though. They gave us a six-hour run up with the ‘comfortable’ announcement, which is preferable to just dropping on wires like they did with the Duke of Edinburgh.” It gave on-air correspondents time to switch into black ties, a formal rule that broadcasters follow after controversy when one of their predecessors announced the death of the Queen Mother in 2002 wearing a maroon tie and was castigated for it. (Huw Edwards, the BBC anchor who would end up breaking the news to the nation, switched into a black tie just before 2pm.)
At another national newspaper, staff kept being pulled out of a midday meeting to work on stories around the sudden turn in the Queen’s health. Eventually, the meeting was disbanded, according to one staffer. “I checked in with other editors who took the right decision to cancel on me because they needed to tear up pages and rewrite pieces from years back with new info,” says the second newspaper journalist. A first version of a front page announcing the Queen’s death was drawn up by mid-afternoon – based on a hunch that events would move quickly. Push notifications were disabled for fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment (a consideration The Times forgot about for their banner advertising a flash sale).
At The Times, things were more chaotic. Old stories, pre-written in preparation for the day, were being dusted off in anticipation of the worst. One journalist with knowledge of the newsroom says the tech team was assembled into making sure the website didn’t fall over at a key moment; the paper prepared an obituary that was published with the wrong date of the Queen’s death, marking it as 9 September, not the 8th.
For The Guardian, one story, first published in 2017, became a huge driver of traffic. ‘London Bridge is down‘ details the meticulous preparations for the Queen’s death, and how the country’s institutions would react. At its peak on Thursday, the story was being viewed 8,000 times a minute, according to internal Guardian data. Search terms that drove traffic to the page included “London bridge is down”, “London bridge has fallen”, and “what happens when the queen dies”. At a major commercial radio station, one producer described events as “chaos”. “We had to do our show as usual just waiting for the official announcement,” they told me in the late afternoon, “which still hasn’t come.” The producers were caught in limbo, covering issues with the Queen’s health while also paying lip service to the massive energy announcement unveiled just hours earlier. They were “just waiting for the official palace announcement which then means we can drop everything and go all guns blazing.”
At 1.15pm, radio stations were half-heartedly planning non-royal news for later that night. I was contacted by a broadcast producer asking to talk on the radio around 5.30pm about this week’s new iPhone announcements. I joked that I’d very lightly pencil it in – and wouldn’t be offended when they inevitably cancelled. They laughed before hanging up, recognising what was coming.
That the announcement would come felt inevitable. “We saw Truss and Starmer get handed notes,” says the commercial radio producer. “When I saw that, my heart sank. I knew straight away. We all did.”
It’s a sentiment many journalists have. Potentially the biggest news story of their lives, it’s also the one that no one wants to be carrying the can for. “I feel like I’ve had a couple of close calls when I’ve been off-shift amid rumour and fears she’d die in the recent past,” says one producer at an international TV station. “It broke with pinging, angry shouting and the urgent need to get royal voices onto the air to fill the on-screen void the story created.” For hours, royal biographers, historians and experts were in demand. “They’re tough booking,” admits the TV producer. “Their phones were ringing off the hook; the higher profile ones are locked out and retained in deals done years ago. My channel had a plan and so far so good.”
Yet for all the hard work, theirs is not the channel most people turn to for major events. “I feel violently sick,” one broadcast journalist working for the BBC told me, mid-afternoon, after it was known Elizabeth was gravely ill, but before her death was announced. The BBC’s bullpen newsroom, which takes up an entire floor at Broadcasting House and acts as the live-action backdrop for news programmes, was becoming crowded.
It wasn’t just journalists booked for shifts that day. Flagship presenters from BBC Radio 4’s Today programme were called in to cover the news that was expected. Bosses who are rarely seen in the office suddenly felt the need to be there and steer the coverage.
Some staff were lucky to stay away, having dodged the bullet of being on shift on the day the Queen died. “It’s very weird watching something play out that we’ve all been preparing and rehearsing for pretty much our entire careers,” says a third BBC journalist. “I know the protocol and sequence of events almost instinctively from obit rehearsals and briefings that have happened with increased regularity over the years.” (There’s usually one every three to six months; the journalist says the most recent run-through was relatively recently. Scripts are pre-written and carefully defined, and set up on autocues to read in the event of a royal death.) “But actually watching it, it’s sort of an out of body experience. God knows how Huw [Edwards] must feel in the middle of all this.”
It was through another tweet from Buckingham Palace, and a special broadcast that blocked out many BBC TV channels, that most people learned of the Queen’s death at 6.30pm. BBC2 interrupted athletics coverage; Channel 4 butted into a standoff on Hollyoaks. Like all of us, Buckingham Palace’s tweet is how many journalists found out about the epoch-changing news. The commercial radio producer saw the Palace’s tweet and shared it with around half a dozen colleagues sitting in the studio, who had been broadcasting conjecture about the news for nearly six hours by then.
And still, they waited. It’s not the sort of thing you can afford to get wrong – though plenty did, with a flurry of tweets around 3.07pm from the likes of the BBC’s Yalda Hakim, Sky News’s Inzamam Rashid and Guido Fawkes, all announcing the Queen’s death prematurely.
They checked with the editor of the programme that they were OK to announce the news. They flicked a switch, turning the lighting black and went into “obit mode”. A pre-recorded obituary was played after the announcement was made. “Now we’re just rolling,” they say.
Last Week’s Birthdays
Jason Sudeikis (47), Jada Pinkett Smith (51), Keeley Hazell (36), Tim McInnerny (66), Cassandra Peterson (71), Mickey Rourke (70), Jennifer Tilly (64), Madeline Zima (37), Amy Poehler (51), Danny John-Jules (62), Tom Hardy (45), John Bradley (34), Tommy Lee Jones (76), Oliver Stone (76), Brendan O’Carroll (67), Prince Harry (38), Jimmy Carr (50), Sam Neill (75), Andrew Lincoln (49), Walter Koenig (86), Alfie Allen (36), and Linda Gray (82).
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