Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.
The Pre-Mature Funeral: When Algorithms Outpace the Mortuary
By A. Carter-Wilson
On Tuesday 19 May, Radio Caroline — that venerable ship which originally floated upon British airwaves as a pirate vessel in theSwinging Sixties before slowly domesticating into something approaching respectability — performed an autopsy on King Charles III while he was still breathing. Or at least, while his heartbeat persisted as publicly documented matter. A software bug, according to station director Peter Moore’s carefully mortified communique; a ghost-click, if one prefers the more operatic lexicon. Either way, the result was identical: across the English Channel and presumably beyond, listeners woke to the solemn announcement that Their Majesty had passed, followed immediately — as mandated by protocol — into the kind of ceremonious silence reserved only for departed sovereigns.
What Radio Caroline experienced is known in British broadcasting circles as “the King’s Death” procedure — Operation Forthyn in its coded incarnation — a fail-safe automation that any United Kingdom radio station maintains in perpetuity, though all stations fervently hope never to see activated. It sits dormant like a loaded revolver beneath the desk: there for contingency, embarrassing when discharged accidentally, and absolutely mortifying when one realises it has been firing while the room was still occupied.
His Majesty deceased via live national transmission before anyone upstairs even noticed a firmware had updated overnight.
The silence that followed — precisely as specified by protocol, an elegantly morbid blankness meant to signal respect — is what actually alerted station management to the disaster. As if the automated obituary itself were not embarrassing enough, the subsequent void functioned like a digital death rattle: the broadcasting equivalent of announcing someone has died and then immediately dropping into an extended period of uncomfortable silence while everyone in the room tries very hard not to think about whether they really did just say that on air.
One recalls Marcel Proust also observing, somewhat darkly, something about automatisms — those neural habits we construct so diligently only to find ourselves enslaved by them: “C’est vraiment en nous-mêmes que est l’enfer.” The true hell is within ourselves. And what could be more hellish than a computer system you built specifically not to make mistakes, which then proceeds to announce the King dead while he remains sitting on his throne, very much alive?
The station’s response — dignified apology, prompt correction, continued broadcasting as though nothing had happened — was precisely what one would expect from a properly mortified institution. Radio Caroline did not merely correct their mistake; they apologised for “any disturbance caused” with the kind of formal obsequiousness usually reserved for genuine royal offences rather than firmware bugs executed at 4 AM without any human present to stop them mid-sentence during a particularly elaborate declaration concerning His Majesty’s passing.
The silence following Radio Caroline’s error was protocol-perfect: exactly as specified down to the millisecond of vacuous blankness intended to signal appropriate reverence for departed sovereigns. It is perhaps worth noting, in all seriousness given how much has transpired this week, that a radio station which once launched from an anchored yacht outside Essex and broadcast music the authorities considered entirely subversive now finds itself apologising because its computer was slightly too enthusiastic about royalty being dead. A pirate vessel’s most recent rebellion against authority has been to accidentally publish it ahead of schedule — which rather reverses the traditional meaning of piracy if one thinks about it for any length of time whatsoever.
“Les véritables malheurs de la vie sont ceux qu’on ne peut pas expliquer,” Proust wrote with characteristic bleakness, approximately translating as “the true misfortunes of life are the ones which cannot be explained.” This one can certainly be explained: a computer bug triggered a royal death protocol prematurely. Or perhaps it cannot — if you consider that “a computer bug” is barely more illuminating than saying “fate intervened,” and in both cases, something invisible inside us proved far quicker than human oversight could possibly manage to contain.
The machine announced before it was certain; the operators corrected after they were terrified. Between those two movements lies perhaps the entire modern condition: automation moving faster than awareness, algorithms anticipating events which have not occurred, a kingdom’s death declared by code — and then quickly, desperately unsaid. A pirate radio station once launched to evade authority now found apologising because its technology was simply too anxious about death to keep waiting for it politely. Which seems like the most fitting epitaph any algorithm could hope to write itself: dead before due, silent after shame, still broadcasting despite everything — as all good machines and all bad kings presumably ought.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.