Just... why?

So, Prince Philip has died. That is, of course, extremely sad for the Queen - the loss of a husband of so many years must be hard to fathom. I also understand that this is the item that is right at the top of the news agenda - it almost certainly is the most important event in the UK today.

But...

The truth is that Philip was a 99-year-old man who had been in uncertain health recently. So this isn't unexpected news by any stretch of the imagination. It's also true to note that there is almost nothing to say about this story - the Royal Family are unsurprisingly not about to parade their grief before the world, and so the journalists basically have nothing to say.

So the BBC's standard approach to the big news story, of putting together an interminable loop of empty nonsense to fill up a channel, is already overkill. There is just about justification for putting such a thing together and running it on the BBC News channel so that people can dip in, get informed, and move on.

But can someone please explain to me why the BBC have felt the need to run the same, pointless, empty feed of nonsense on all of their mainstream channels? BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC News, BBC Parliament, BBC Alba, and BBC Scotland are currently all showing exactly the same thing... and that same thing is utterly and completely devoid of content.

There is, just maybe, an argument about it being a mark of respect. Except that the mark of respect appropriate for a grieving family is to give them privacy and space, not to put them at the centre of a media circus. If that was the aim, the BBC should properly suspend it's programming - pull the plug on all their channels for the duration.

It seems we really have lost our collective minds.

#15: "The Dwarves", by Markus Hietz