The Kennedy Assassination
30 November, 1963

News of President Kennedy’s assassination, I gather, was treated by both BBC and ITV with pretty prompt re-arrangement of programmes, but could not be wholly satisfactory. Naturally afterwards there was some criticism of the first immediate hours after the event. For a television critic who should always know, ideally, how television has dealt with any and every happening, this was one of the times that show the critic should literally never stop watching.

I do not write with personal knowledge of the course of the programmes on that Friday evening, except for the later part, because by chance it was one of the occasional evenings “off” when I was going to watch nothing but the BBC’s Britten programme. So it was that I got an unexpected insight into how upsetting and irritating it can be to hear almost unbelievably bad news without any explanation. The Britten programme was my first contact with television (or sound) that day and it had already begun when I turned it on. After it I caught, quite incidentally, the announcement that there would be a concert programme to follow because of “the death of President Kennedy”. But there was nothing at all about what had happened. The concert took place, and was followed by the Prime Minister’s tribute, and before this there was merely the same statement that the President was “shot down in a Texas street” but nothing more.