FOR the fifth conclave in a row, white smoke was sighted from the Sistine Chapel at the perfect moment to disrupt British evening drive bulletins — 5.07 p.m. UK time, to be precise. On PM (Radio 4, Thursday), the producers took about two minutes to allow Evan Davis to smuggle a ten-second announcement into the middle of the US President’s and the UK Prime Minister’s mutually gushing praise for signing a trade deal.
Over on Times Radio, John Pienaar was covering the same event when his producers got to the punch about 50 seconds earlier. He padded his minute-long piece with lavish promises of extensive coverage later in the programme. TalkSport, whose five-o’clock news headlines led with the announcement of Maro Itoje as Lions’ tour captain, didn’t interrupt its soccer patter, but even it mentioned the white smoke in its scheduled 5.30-p.m. bulletin.
In the UK’s most heavily Roman Catholic region, Richard Morgan, of BBC Radio Ulster’s Evening Extra had the bizarre experience of interrupting a report from VE Day 80 festivities on the staunchly Protestant Shankill Road to announce, “We’ve white smoke. A new pope has been elected.”
By 5.19, Davis was cutting to a recording of the whoop of delight as the smoke was spotted, before giving Vatican Radio’s Susan Hodges a few minutes to explain how the new pope would be saying prayers and getting changed behind the scenes. He was devastated to learn that the identity of the new pope might not be revealed until he’d handed over to the Six O’Clock News. Sarah Rainsford was on location in the Vatican. The atmospheric cheering and whooping in the background were occasionally interrupted by communications-link issues.
At 5.52, Radio 4 featured the Editor-in-Chief of the Catholic Herald, Dr Serenhedd James, for a fun if foamy filler piece about Swiss Guards’ uniforms and Latin phraseology, which ran right up to the weather forecast, leaving Davis’s hopes dashed.
Pienaar was still on air at 6.10, joined by the political hack Kevin Schofield, and consultant-for-hire Jo Tanner (neither knowledgeable on the subject), when they cut to Rome. A locally based stringer, Philip Willan, added gravitas and atmospheric background sounds, but did make the howler of saying that the two-day conclave meant “a lot of us are assuming” it was Cardinal Parolin, minutes before the announcement. His phone line died at this point, forcing Pienaar to reach manfully for a plug for The Times’s YouTube channel.
After Cardinal Robert Prevost’s name was announced (News, 9 May), Times Radio carried a full minute of chatter from a Square clearly disappointed, initially at least, in a non-Italian, giving the show’s researchers time to hit Wikipedia. Pienaar announced that Prevost was a moderate as well as an American; Tanner claimed that Trump would see this as a win. She then demanded a conclave for the next Conservative leadership election.