IRN Pre-Broadcast Feed On Princess Diana's Death + Initial Bulletin, 31st August 1997

Описание: This is a fascinating bit of audio from 1997 that would have mostly gone unbroadcast at the time. It's a recording of pre-broadcast instructions from the UK's Independent Radio News, which was transmitted to all non-BBC local radio stations in the early hours of 31st August of that year - the day that Princess Diana died.

The recording begins with audible bleeps which would have automatically alerted night time staff that an announcement was coming. There then follows a lengthy live announcement from the news room, informing every station of what had happened, and stressing the importance of not breaking the news until a given time. The announcer then gives information on when the first bulletin will occur, and the procedure that all stations are to follow regarding later news bulletins.

After a 60 second long countdown into the news, we get that first bulletin. This was broadcast nationwide across all Independent Local Radio stations. There then followed the national anthem (omitted in this upload in case of copyright bother) and what appears to be a final little automated bleep to hand control back to each station.

One ILR station that did not appear to properly follow this procedure was Talk Radio. Presenter Mike Dickin, who was running the late-night phone-in, broke the news roughly a quarter-hour ahead of schedule after seeing reports from the Associated Press, which were released despite a brief news embargo (which lasted until Buckingham Palace confirmed the story). A snippet of his announcement is stuck on to the end of this upload.

I managed to get hold of these recordings from digging around the Internet Archive for stuff to do with an old website I used to regularly read, called the Meldrum Home Page. MHP was an early example of British TV nostalgia on the net; it also included a lot of British TV technical info relating to both the time period it was published in and everything pre-1990. There was one section which had been created and then regularly updated in the wake of Diana's death, and it's from that page I was able to retrieve these files. (The originals were in cruddy old RealAudio, as was the style of the time.)

And yes, I am aware the ILR and ILN logos are out of date in context. They were the only ones I could source from anywhere in something approaching quality...