The BBC admitted yesterday that it got the coverage of the Diamond Jubilee river pageant wrong. Thousands of viewers and some of the channel’s own employees complained on social networking sites about slipshod production, factual inaccuracies and a levity of tone that did not befit the unprecedented state occasion.
There was a very different reaction to the coverage of yesterday’s thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral, where sombre reporting from Huw Edwards and Simon Schama won praise.
The BBC denied changing the line-up in response to criticism and said that it had always intended to adopt different tones for different days.
A spokesman said: “The flotilla is an event you can never rehearse for and there are elements over which you have very little control.”
A BBC insider acknowledged that the channel failed to capture effectively the sight of the 1,000 boats: “It wasn’t exactly as we would like to have covered it; the rain forced our hand. We were cutting away from scenes more often than we would have liked . . . we did not own the tone of the flotilla.”
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On Monday the BBC insisted that it was “very proud of the quality and breadth” of its coverage. Later, it added the caveat that this was a “broadcasting event of unprecedented scale and complexity”.
Yesterday’s mea culpa came as viewers expressed frustration at further blunders, particularly during the firework display at the end of Monday night’s concert at Buckingham Palace.
Margaret, Countess Attlee, the former daughter-in-law of the late Prime Minister Clement Attlee, wrote to The Times: “They ended their coverage of the concert, unforgivably, during the spectacular climax: the cameras cut to a long view of the fireworks, which were obscured by rolling credits.”
A spokesman said that the concert ran four minutes over schedule and transparent credits were used, rather than cutting to a black screen.
Ben Weston, 41, the executive editor overseeing coverage of the four-day celebrations, was responsible for the decision to use presenters such as Tess Daly and Fearne Cotton, and to switch between views of the pageant and what have been described as “inane skits” on the river banks.
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Yesterday he told Radio 5 Live: “We didn’t just want to reflect what was happening on the boats . . . we wanted to reflect all the colour and the celebration going on in those parks.”
Questions may also be asked of more senior BBC executives, who were involved in high-level meetings about the coverage. They included George Entwistle, the director of BBC Vision and a candidate for the post of director-general. The BBC insisted that the meetings were about logistics rather than production.