Churchill's Funeral: Completing the Schedule

Today, 30 January, is the anniversary of the State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, who died aged 90 in 1965. 

There are a number of occasions in recent years – for example the death of Princess Diana and 9/11 – where the BBC schedules were necessarily abandoned or radically altered on the day itself and some days following. Of course these last-minute changes could not be reflected in the magazine, which was already printed, so the Genome listings are different from the actual transmissions. 

Because Sir Winston died on a Sunday, and the funeral was set for the following Saturday, the planned edition of Radio Times could be scrapped, and a new version published with a tribute cover and articles.

However, the television listings in the magazine for that Saturday only list the arrangements for the funeral, not any other programmes, although much of what was scheduled was actually still broadcast.

When the 50th anniversary of the funeral came round two years ago, we decided to rectify the omission – partly to see what issues might arise when we went about fixing similar problems on other problematic dates, and also to see what sort of thing we could do with Genome in the future – displaying the actual transmission details instead of just the scheduled programmes. 

We were fortunately able to source a rare copy of the original version of that week’s Radio Times, with the planned schedule, which gave us the synopsis and contributors for those planned programmes which were still transmitted on 30 January. Other information, such as the exact transmission times, came from the BBC records of what was shown on the day.

Sir Winston Churchill's funeral was a historic event, and one of the most memorable television occasions of the 1960s. It was also one of the last major state occasions commentated upon by Richard Dimbleby, the veteran BBC reporter, war correspondent and presenter, who sadly died the following December.