Sometimes on ceremonial occasions there would be technical trouble. An example was the departure of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh from the Opera during their State visit to Paris in April 1957:
They had the Garde Republicaine with all their lovely uniforms on the stairs and searchlights outside, something like a hundred and fifty thousand people outside the Opera House. I was in a box inside where I’d been for the performance, and had to commentate on her departure from the front of the Opera without seeing myself what was going on. I could see, of course, what the television cameras outside were showing me on a television set inside this box, so watching that I was able to describe the thing – that was the idea. Just before we went on – in fact, ten seconds before we went on the air – the lights failed in the Opera House, and not only was I plunged into pitch darkness but the monitor was switched off automatically and the picture went dead. The lights all went out and I was in this little box, with curtains across the front so dark that I literally couldn’t see my hand if I held it up like this. Unable to see anything that was happening outside, but on the air – and since my telephone had broken down no means of telling the producer that I couldn’t see, so I had to listen to the cheers outside and guess what was going on and say – ‘Well now, here goes the procession’, and with the sweat pouring down my face, and after about – after about ten minutes of this the producer realised that I couldn’t see, and began telling me on my headphones what he could see through his cameras, and we managed to get it right. And I think people never really listen to television because nobody wrote in to say: ‘Now what happened? What went wrong?’ It was very disappointing. I wish somebody had noticed that we made a mess of it.
