Why doesn t she hurry up and die? That was the shocking attitude of a number of BBC journalists to the 99th birthday of Her Majesty the Queen Mum at the beginning of this month. I tell you, I ll cheer when that blue bulb lights up, growled one.
We were talking in the canteen of Broadcasting House in London while, outside, the populace continued to go calmly about its business.
Which was a bit of a bummer. I d assumed that the entirety of Britland would be dancing in the streets to celebrate the extraordinary life of this truly remarkable lady (Daily Mirror).
But the only flurry of agitation I could find was here among the Beeb-folk, and them fretting for funeral hymns, not fervid for Happy Birthdays.
The reason they want it over is that for as long as it s not they must stay alert for the blue bulb lighting. That s the blue bulb in every BBC station which will switch on the instant it s confirmed the Queen Mum s brown bread.
Even in the tiniest far-flung outposts of the BBC empire, the unattended studio on South Uist, for example, or the pokey room beside the PDs on South Anne Street, there s a blue bulb with no other function than to signal that she s snuffed it. Every Beeb employee involved in broadcasting will then instantly snap into a pre-set procedure from which they dare not, on pain of dismissal, deviate.
From the moment the blue bulb lights up, fingers will be poised over shift keys, ready, at a signal, to switch over and take a feed from Radio Four, where solemn music will be played until the formal announcement that she s a goner is ready for transmission.
What happens, I wondered, if there s only one person on duty when the blue bulb lights up and that person en route in a desperate hurry for the bogs?
I asked about that, responded a senior journalist mournfully, and was told it didn t matter if I pissed myself or shit myself. Every outlet has to switch to Radio Four for the dirge music and then the death-notice at the exact same split second everywhere. Waiting for it to happen is always somewhere at the back of your mind.
It ll be an enormous relief when it s over.
Every so often you think that the British are beginning to catch themselves on, and then you hear something like this. But then we musn t be bigoted. My guy did want her dead asap, which it has to be conceded is a mature and balanced approach. And the broad mass of the plain people were notably non-hysterical about the birthday business. It s mainly the media which lose the run of themselves.
Here s a random few facts about the Queen Mum which I gleaned from an armful of souvenir supplements on the way home to common sense and Rossville Street.
She has six places to live in two castles, a mansion, a manor, a royal lodge, Clarence House in London, and a five-bedroom fishing lodge on the river Dee which her family gave her for her 80th birthday. The Castle of May, in the Highlands, where she lives for five weeks a year, costs the Brit tax-payer half a mill. annually.
She has her first gin and Dubonnet every day at exactly 12.30pm, except when she s at Sandringham, where she opens the day s drinking with a glass of gin as elevenses. She has her own personal silver bucket for chilling a bottle of champagne in at dinner every night. For much of the past 50 years, and all of the time after four in the afternoon, she has been drunk as a skunk.
At the age of 24 she went on a safari to Africa and shot dead a buffalo, a wart-hog, a water buck, an antelope and a rhinocerous.
She is for capital punishment and corporal punishment but is against coloured immigration and thinks Africans are too stupid to govern themselves. She hates Germans and habitually refers to them as the Huns .
In addition to the upkeep of her homes, she receives #643,000 a year from the tax-payer, and, according to Mirror Royal Correspondent Jane Kerr, finds another two million pounds a year to augment her lifestyle . Finds.
Her corgis don t get on with the Queen s corgis. In 1989, her favourite corgi, Ranger, led a pack which killed the Queen s favourite corgi, Chipper, by ripping it limb from limb, amid scenes of grief and savagery in Windsor Great Park.
She reckons that the decision to make the Royal family pay tax was a dreadful betrayal . She has 30 personal servants. Her two favourite sayings are What goes up must come down and All good things must come to an end . One of her ancestors was burned at the stake as a witch. She was perplexed when, at the age of 39, a servant asked her: Do you want more chips, Your Majesty? , because she didn t know what chips were. At the age of 10 she had a pet pig called Lucifer. Bobby Charlton met her once, 32 years ago, and says: That sort of thing doesn t happen every day . Perhaps she ll be dead by the time this appears.
I made it home and staggered indoors and turned on The World Tonight on Radio Four to hear somebody say, apropos the reportedly crumbling Northern ceasefires, that There has always been an element of irrationality in politics in Northern Ireland .
And the mad thought occurred to me: why doesn t she hurry up and die. n