Elizabeth II funeral: television at meeting of last moments of a queen born on small screen

Most channels will broadcast the ceremony, Monday, September 19, from 6 a.m.

How many will they be on Monday, September 19, to say goodbye of viewers to Elizabeth II? Whether they zap on TF1, on France 2 or on the news channels, the French will have almost no other choice than to attend his funeral, from 6 am – and even 5 hours for cnews.

Some antennas will only resume their normal programming around 3 p.m. or 4 p.m., when others, like the Franceinfo channel, will extend their special edition until 6 p.m. After 8 p.m., it will be over a sequence in many historical respects for the TV media, inseparable from the reign of the Queen of England. In 1952, his coronation had been followed by 277 million viewers worldwide, a figure then incredible. According to estimates, they could be 4.1 billion to follow the state funeral broadcast live worldwide.

As soon as the state of health of the monarch became worrying, on September 8, BFM-TV worked to relocate, across the Channel, part of his writing and most of his plateaus. In all, a dozen teams of reporters and seventy people have made the trip to the kingdom, not counting the external stakeholders.

“Strengthen the BFM-TV reflex”

“This event reassocates our channel to the historic event”, underlines Marc-Olivier Fogiel, the director general of the news channel of the Altice group. After the COVID-19 or the war in Ukraine, the disappearance of the Queen was an opportunity to “strengthen the BFM-TV reflex” among viewers when the news rushes.

“Beyond the blast effect [” breath “] from the twenty-four to forty-eight first hours, we quickly decided to speak of something else, explains Michel Dumoret, the director of National editors of France Télévisions. The war in Ukraine continues, the energy crisis threatens …: we have the obligation to say that the rest of the world continues to (badly) work. “

Among the eight teams of three people who will report on the events from England on Monday, some were therefore sent to places “hit hard by the crisis, like Liverpool”, in order to make another tone heard that the one that will reign in Westminster or Windsor. “The death of the Queen of England is clearly a global event, but we cannot obscure that part of the English remain very distant,” insists the journalist.

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/Media reports.