The Queen Mother's funeral - view from the sofa

By TOM SUTCLIFFE

Looming vacancy can do strange things to a broadcaster.

Faced with an image of one of Windsor Castle's gates, bathed in a diluted sunshine, Brian Hanrahan found himself clutching at his research notes: "Still has holes at the top for pouring boiling oil out", he said knowledgeably, "So…the castle was a working castle".

This curious definition of operational efficiency lodged in the mind (had the Queen found the facility comforting during her annus horribilis?) and it wasn't dislodged for quite some time because the BBC – in its anxiety not to be thought undemonstrative – had begun its coverage of the Queen Mother's funeral very early indeed.

It was a very long way from nine o'clock to the beginning of the ceremonies proper and there wasn't a great deal to fill it.

Showing your homework, as Hanrahan had done, was a solution widely adopted; this wasn't a day on which you were going to hear Westminster Hall mentioned without an attached sub-clause about its celebrated hammer beam roof.

The other ploy was that familiar rhetorical trope at moments of broadcast solemnity, the funereal break-step: every sentence …was completed …as slowly as was consistent …with comprehension.

David Dimbleby proved particularly expert at this, stretching the gap between noun and verb so boldly that you occasionally wondered whether there had been a technical failure.

Dimbleby was seated high above Westminster Abbey in the People's Vitrine, a small glassed in studio to which representative mourners were brought to offer anecdotes and floral tributes.

All classes were represented here, from Lady Pamela Hicks to the perfectly named William de Rouet, a former equerry from the Irish Guards, and Eileen Holland, an East Ender who did her heartfelt bit about doodle-bugs and wartime spirit.

Beside them sat Professor Simon Schama, a kind of customs inspector of historical significance, beaming awkwardly as the exigencies of a multi-camera broadcast kept him mute for the bulk of the morning. By the end of the day he knew a little more about royal duty, the necessity to smile continuously and keep your opinions to yourself.

Over on ITV Trevor McDonald and Jon Suchet were doing a very similar job – Trevor pulling out all the vox humana stops as Suchet added little grace notes, such as the names of the two lead horses on the gun carriage.

But the BBC felt as if it had proprietory entitlement to this occasion. Their pictures were brighter and sharper, for some reason, and their command of rhetorical manner more assured – despite more awkward pauses than you might have expected.

This is partly because Dimbleby was born to this form of electronic courtship – both he and we learned it at his father's knee – but it's also because the BBC have Tom Fleming, a state limousine of sonorous gravity which is only pulled off the blocks for a really special occasion.

Fleming was the best of the day or the worst – depending on your taste for this kind of high unction. Occasionally the duty to gild the lily would collide oddly with a more routine task of naming names that appeared suddenly on screen: "Here in the abbey she would look around and see faces she knew …Stephen Byers of course".

Up in the gallery the director had accidentally cut the Queen Mother into intimate acquaintance with one of her daughter's least popular ministers. The "of course" is a Fleming trademark – sprinkled liberally on his speech as if the entire country shares his knowledge of Debrett's and the minutiae of precedence: "And there too, of course, Daniel Chatto and the Lady Sarah Chatto", he said, as the chief mourners left the chapel. Of course, you thought. Anything else would be unthinkable.

This is – as Fiona Bruce discovered in some vanishingly brief vox pops with the crowd, "the kind of thing that Britain does really well". This was offered as a patriotic boast, but it couldn't help but have a faintly dismal aftertaste. We can't run a decent rail service, but we can make the Welsh Guards arrive in perfect synchrony with the chimes of Big Ben. The Royal Mail is barely worthy of the name but a royal funeral will allow the seamless coordination of Spitfire fly-pasts and a massed pipe lament.

Caught in the powerful rip of imperial pageantry you couldn't help wondering why the virtues the Queen Mother represented to so many people – duty, service, respect – couldn't be applied by them to more quotidian matters.

Simon Schama eventually did get a word out – in fact several, almost all of them fascinating. The morning, he suggested, "vindicates the presence of the monarchy as something larger than dynasty or dressing up".

That's arguable, and the fact that it was finally jolted the BBC's broadcast out of its reverential somnolence, a caution that ultimately seemed out of keeping with a public mood that was curious rather than grief-stricken. In the end there was just a tiny bit more black tie than was strictly necessary.

- INDEPENDENT

Feature: The Queen Mother 1900-2002

Funeral pictures