On Monday 19 September, Queen Elizabeth II was laid to rest at Windsor Castle, hours after her state funeral. While world leaders and international royals gathered at Westminster Abbey, members of the public filled the streets of London, with at least 26 million British viewers tuning in to watch the service from home.
The audience was lower than the viewing figures for the Euro 2020 football tournament final at Wembley (29.8 million across the BBC and ITV combined), an event which commanded the highest audience since the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 (32.1 million). It was previously estimated that 33 million viewers watched the news coverage on the day of the Queen’s death, 8 September, although the peak audience watching simultaneously is thought to have been under 10 million.
Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said that an estimated 250,000 people had queued to see the Queen lying in state in Westminster Hall ahead of the funeral. Quickly dubbed ‘The Queue’ by the media, it reached around five miles long at its peak, with waits in excess of 12 hours, and periods of closure when it reached capacity. The London Ambulance Service said that over 2,000 people in the queue had received medical treatment, with 240 taken to hospital.
The funeral has joined the ranks of the most watched television broadcasts in British history, coming in at number 10 (under events including 1969’s Royal Family documentary, 1970’s Apollo 13 Splashdown, and the 1981 wedding between the then Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales). An advertising ban was instituted across commercial networks such as ITV, as well as for Channel 4, meaning broadcasters could not make significant monetary profit from the viewing surge.