Prince Philip in hospital

If he was to die today or tomorrow, the tricky bit is what to do about the Queen's speech where she talks about Phil.

The royals do seem to be downplaying this, being taken to hospital and then immediately having a heart operation is not the minor incident they seem to be making out.

Considering this years schedule I don't think dropping it for running news would be as big an issue as it would have been in the past.

If a senior royal died I doubt the BBC would care what they had scheduled that evening on BBC1. It would either be cancelled, or would have have to fit into whatever non-news slots were left. Normal programming would be very trivial in comparison in the opinion of many

But this is TVF, the home of triviality in the face of adversity.

Now, bets on what BBC2 would do... toxic green special anno slide?

Breaking news..... wife visit husband in hospital....... shocker...... I think people are reading a bit to much into this
I think people have written him off. It xtmas tomorrow I kinda think he would like some visitors especially at this time of year.

Err, actually I think you've overestimated people here. We all now know the operation was just a coronary stent. As someone who has personal experience of this with my father, this operation means little more than a day or two overnight stay. Nobody is writing him off, they would be stupid to do so.

He cant go yet.

Just think of the 'wit and wisdom' the UK will miss out on during Diamond Jubliee year!

Is he gonna ask the Scottish driving instructor how he keeps the natives off the booze long enough to take their driving test? LOL

Or the Edinburgh factory owner if his fuse box was put in by an Indian...

It would never be held back for 2 days, but it would be restricted for a while to allow a nice organised release of the news. If the Royal died in hospital the news could theoretically be kept back from everywhere for as long as they wanted - no foreign news organisation would announce it before they had some sort of confirmation. When the Queen Mother died the news was in the hands of the newsrooms for a while before it was announced on air, it's only common sense - it allows everyone to prepare to announce it.

However the practicalities of doing that, especially in these days of social media are increasingly impossible, it only takes one nurse with a smartphone and access to Twitter and it's out there in the public domain.

Lets hope that IRN, under the auspices of Sky, are better prepared than ITN's IRN were when the Queen Mum died!

Although I'm sure we can take the current events at face value and Phil will probably be up and about before we know it, there is a history of the Royals managing the press when it comes to this sort of thing. The most extreme case probably being George V's doctor, who said he gave him a lethal injection when he was on his death bed, so that the news of his death could be timed to be announced in The Times rather than the "less appropriate evening journals".

Yes indeed. It was a shocking operation back in 2002 and some stations still haven't fully recovered from the trauma inflicted. Sky News would just drop the obit stuff on IRN 1 and the normal news would be on IRN 2 so its much easier now than back then.