What's the worst thing you have ever witnessed first-hand happen on live tv?

[MyCheeryPearlTraybake]

For me it would have to be Christian Eriksson collapsing at the euros in 2021

"Walking the Nile"when a journalist accompanying the documentary maker died of heatstroke.

This wasn't live but it still shocks me and I wasn't prepared to see it.I don't remember there being a warning. The group completing the walk just had to carry on and leave him there or they would have been in danger too. Awful.

9/11 especially when you heard and saw people jumping absolutely horrific

The SAS storming the Iranian embassy. The first time in history you could get live images like that on broadcast TV.

It was all very gung-ho and bertie big bollocks, but hostages died.

If I had seen 9/11 live, that would probably have eclipsed it.

Something that’s always stayed with me was when Five Star were guests on ‘Going Live’ on a Saturday morning and someone phoned in to ask them a question. Instead of the usual ‘what’s your favourite colour’ etc, they shouted down the phone ‘WHY ARE YOU SO SHIT?!’ I was so shocked and you should’ve seen Phil Schofield’s face, poor man. I’ll never forget it.

9/11. It was unbelievably shocking and so distressing. The people jumping. I still think about it often.

The Bradford fire in May 1985
Hillsborough
9/11
Tommy Cooper dying live on telly although I was quite young at the time and didn’t fully realise what was happening, I thought he’d just collapsed.

We were at work when 9/11 happened and heard it as a news item on the radio. I don't think i could comprehend it properly til I saw it on tv

9/11. Challenger.

Keith Chegwin's willy on that C5 gameshow around 2000

I also remember putting the telly on after my baby DS's nap and not being able to comprehend what was happening as the plane hit the twin towers.

Oh yeah I'll add Grenfell and Challenger to my original list.

I’m also old enough to remember Tommy Cooper’s death and Hillsborough - the commentary ‘and the sun still shines’ is haunting

To complete the awful football trilogy

heysel

9/11 for me, it was so haunting seeing people jumping. And the slow realisation that this was a planned attack, you wondered where was next.
Hillsborough was awful too.

9/11 I was actually walking past a TV shop at Bluewater shopping centre and it was being shown live on multiple TV's in their window. We went into the shop to find out what was happening. So shocking.

9/11. I was actually on a team which planned scenarios for mass casualty events. Back then in the UK with the IRA this was a known tactic, first event, then second to get the emergency services that had gone in as well. Our plans were evacuate a certain radius, wait for second event or rule it out, then send in rescue teams when it was safe to do so.

i remember watching the second plane and saying to a colleague at least that tower and the immediate area would have been evacuated. The realisation that they had given “stay put” advice so not only were people remaining in the second tower, that they also hadn’t evacuated when they collapsed.

also the realisation that they sent so many emergency services in with no risk assessment, with no plan for their safety and actually increased the death toll rather than reducing it.

Tommy Cooper's collapse and death on stage. It all happened so slowly and the camera stayed on him far too long.

9/11.

I was working abroad in an A&E department, and not even in the USA. We were put on stand by incase it was some sort of worldwide attack. 😔

Mrs Brown's Boys.

Hillsborough. I remember seeing live TV coverage of people being pulled from the stands and laid on the pitch.

The students in Tiannamen Square.

The little girl running naked from the school that had been amongst those held hostage by the Chechen rebels.

9/11 I was in a charming cottage in a charming village visiting my mum. She went upstairs for a nap and I turned on the TV to see the second plane hit.

News footage of two women buried to their shoulders in Iran, waiting to be stoned to death for adultery.

A man trapped inside a burning tyre running through the streets of Soweto.

On the radio, but a young woman, still out of breath who had been running across the fields away from the music festival on the 7th February in Israel.

All stay with me.

Dr Judy Melenik’s book on being a pathologist in New York on 9/11 is fascinating and heartbreaking

Challenger Space Shuttle blowing up and 9/11

9/11

Hillsborough. Watched it unfold with the sudden realisation I was watching people be crushed to death.

9/11 - enough said.

IRA Birmingham pub bombings of 1974 when lots of teenagers (which I was then) were blown to bits not long before Christmas. The news showed the police shovelling blood and guts up off the pavements.

The assasination of Kennedy.

9/11 my world view changed that day forever.

I was going to say the same.
The audience, even Jimmy Tarbuck the host, thought at first it was part of his act...it was pretty awful to see.

Then, as everyone else has said, 9/11...and the aftermath of that.