Dan Walker has opened up on the key rule he remembered from the BBC when he announced the death of Queen Elizabeth. The 47-year-old journalist was presenting on Channel 5 when the news broke that the late monarch had died in September 2022 at the age of 96 following a 70-year reign. The former BBC Breakfast host’s time at the broadcaster had taught him about the ‘obituary procedure’ for a major death, which is a process he’s kept in mind wherever he’s worked.
‘When I was at the BBC , now and again, you would go through what they call the obituary procedure: what you would do in the case of what they referred to as a Category 1 death,’ he told Sorted magazine. ‘You need to be super serious, but you also have to have a conversation with your viewers. I don’t know if you ever told a member of your family that someone that you both love has passed away.
‘That’s the conversation you must have. Virtually everybody watching that programme had not known life without the Queen. It did feel like we were losing a family member, somebody that we knew.
’ When it came to covering the news himself, Dan thought about how he’d want to hear the news as a viewer. He explained: ‘On Channel 5, I said something like, “I’m going to tell you some breaking news now. I think you might want to sit down for this.
” ‘That’s certainly the way that I would want to hear it if I were on the other end of that TV screen. ‘I just explained what was happening at Balmoral at .
