What was claimed
BBC radio announced the death of Prince Philip in the middle of a dance track.
Our verdict
It is true that BBC Radio 1 Dance cut a song short to play the national anthem, but the video on social media has been edited.
Announcement of Prince Philip’s death on BBC is edited
A clip on Instagram, which claims that a BBC radio station announced the death of Prince Philip in the middle of a dance track, has gathered almost 700,000 likes.
The video’s audio begins with the song playing on BBC Radio 1 Dance, before it is interrupted with a newsreader saying: “Buckingham Palace has announced the death of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Edinburgh.” The song then immediately resumes.
The video’s caption says: “Still can’t believe this is how bbc radio announced Prince Phillip’s death.”
While this is close to what actually happened, the clip has been edited.
When Prince Philip’s death was announced on 9 April 2021, all the UK-wide BBC Radio stations played the same BBC News message followed by the national anthem, although BBC Radio 1 Dance cut directly to the anthem.
The song playing in the Instagram clip—We Do What We Want by Alan Fitzpatrick—is the same song that was cut off on BBC Radio 1 Dance at the time of the announcement.
However, the altered clip on Instagram cuts directly to the announcement of Prince Philip’s death.
The moment went viral on social media, and was reported on by a number of news sites, inspiring edited clips to spread further on social media.
The clip on Instagram is one such edit, and has been viewed extremely widely with more than four million views on YouTube alone.
The BBC declined to comment.
Image courtesy of University of Salford Press Office
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This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because Radio 1 Dance did cut away from a song to announce the Duke of Edinburgh’s death, but not in the way suggested in the post.