Missed it the first time round? Still not convinced that she’s really dead? Somehow managed to avoid Sir Reginald Dwight and his dirge? Well, set the Sky Plus box because BBC Parliament is the station for you. OTT note that the Diana funeral will be on BBC PArliament on 1st September. Thrill again to the fugging Duke of Edinburgh drawing up in his unmarked small white car. Cringe at the wailing crowds on the television – reminding the casual viewer of Khomenei’s funeral. Look confused at the bizarre site of an inflatable ET and an ALF amid the pyre of flowers placed at Buckingham Palace.
This is of course the precursor to the new ITV1 series, presented by Sir Trevor MacDonald: Britain’s favourite celebrity funeral. You the viewer can vote for your favourite funeral from a list championed by various celebrities. Hear Des Lynam wax lyrical about the funeral of Churchill. David Dickinson regales us with stories of the funeral of Arthur Negus. Gordon Brown puts in a word for John Smith. And Babs Windsor supports the nation’s favourite cockney, the Queen Mum. Votes will be cast via premium rate phone lines, and the favourite funeral will be broadcast with advertisements during the hymns in a simulcast between ITV4 and Men and Motors later in the year.
Gah, publicity… I have to do the semi-live subtitles for it, and I’ve never done them before, so I was kind of banking on the fact that the viewing figures would be approaching nil.
Clearly my favourite celebrity funeral (and I imagine many people’s) will be one for which the celebrity is not yet dead. I assume that this wasn’t the sort of thing you had in mind, but if ITV can guarentee the funeral taking place then I, for one, would be prepared to send some premium rate texts
Indeed, I was about to suggest that my favourite celebrity funeral will be Maggie Thatcher’s.
Stop me if I’ve told you this one before – I am not Nostrodamus, but the following is perfectly true – just a couple of days before the tragic events in the Paris tunnel, I was sitting round playing a game of ‘tabloid headlines’ (a game of my own invention where one player (me) provides a scenario and another (me) has to come up with a pithy Sun/Mirror type headline to describe it) When my turn came I had to deal with the unlikely event of Princess Diana and her boyfriend being killed simultaneously in a tragic accident. My hypothetical headline was “Di and Dodi Dead As Dodos”.
Imagine my horror when not only did the tragic event unfold within 48 hours, but several tabloids purloined my headline, or some near approximation thereof.
But, and this is where it gets really spooky, within hours of the tragic news from Paris, I was moaning over the breakfast table to my kith and kin “Of course you know what this means, don’t you? It means we’ll get that fuggin’ Elton John doing fuggin’ Candle In The Fuggin’ Wind next week at the funeral”
I have never been able to repeat these feats of prognostication.