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

9/11 without a doubt. I recall I had left coroners court as I had attended as part of the jury and as I walked back to get a bus, footage was being shown on the tvs in the window of radio rentals.
harrowing

Sorry I’ve just realised my example wasn’t from live tv.

I’d completely forgotten about Tianemin Square.
That was chilling

Derek Wood and David Howes being murdered.

The two Corporals were pulled out and savagely attacked: stripped, kicked in the head, beaten, stabbed, thrown over a wall “like a sack of spuds”. It was like watching “hyenas” who had “got their kill and they were just ripping it apart”.

I was in London the day of the Kings Cross fire, November 18th. The tube we were on just kept on going and didn't stop for many stations. Of course it being so long ago we didn't know what had happened until we got home. Must have been 34/5 years ago? I still think about it sometimes when I'm on the tube, those awful wooden elevators.

9/11 obvs.

Lockerbie, that's the first time I remember actual pictures of bodies close up in a newspaper and recall being really shocked by it. 1989 or thereabouts. So much has changed.

I was ironing when Bradford fire happened, so awful.

James Bulger really affected me too and Lesley Whittle - Black Panther in the 70's. Sorry I digress, not live TV obvs.

I actually saw that live in person!

The Stephen Ladd footage is horrifying.

Tsnuami

9/11 was harrowing!
Also senna was too. I’m also going to say two horrific accidents I watched live as well as these were the Jules Bianchi crash, which resulted in his death months later. And also a crash in an Indy car race just over a decade ago which resulted in the death of British racing driver Dan Wheldon.

I was driving home as the 2nd plane hit and almost every car, on a major dual carriageway out of Manchester, pulled over to listen to the radio, shock on their faces. When my OH came home from work I was watching CNN and he asked what I had on and it took a while to convince it was real. There was an old photo on the shelf of our children standing atop one of the Towers during a trip.

My brother was at Hillsborough. My mother was beside herself.

Live streaming of Iranian Embassy siege & Hillsborough fire.

9/11 as soon as streamed live interrupting afternoon programmes. I had the day off work & was settling down with a plate of sandwiches to watch Diagnosis Murder or some such show. Surreal experience of seeing the horror & uncertainties in US air space alongside the death & destruction on the ground.

7/7 was local to home & work so the soundscape of emergency sirens was vivid. A colleague was killed on his way into work. I was WFH so I turned on the TV. The most vivid live footage was of a medic giving CPR (?) sat astride a patient on a gurney being run along the road to the A&E at UCLH. I have never forgotten that & not seen the footage since.

The mobile system went down & it was heartwrenchingto see people online searching for news of loved ones.

Frantic parents running up the road to the school in Dunblane. Heartbreaking.

Heysel

I was at my grandparents, my gf forgot to send me out of the room. I was about 14.

I can't remember where it was from now but it was years ago on a YouTube live, which quickly got removed. But it was a line of men, obviously incredibly afraid, kneeling in a line as a man went up and dragged them out one by one to behead them.
At first I thought it was some kind of acting, but quickly realised and stopped watching. Felt haunted for weeks after that, it was horrifying to see.

I recall coming home and my Mum was sitting on the sofa crying about Aberfan. Reporters were lucky not to get punched that day for their intrusiveness.

There was a slew of events around the late 80s and into the 90s that stick with me because I was young. There was the Bradford Fire, King’s Cross fire and Piper Alpha all were shown live stream on tv news. The roro ferry sinking, Hungerford and Dunblane shootings and Lockerbie, again heavily featured live on tv. I remember coming home from swimming lesson and my uncle was visiting to deliver our Christmas presents when it came on the news.

i also remember the huge amount of murders of women on the news around this time.

i remember the news about Diana car crash in Paris. I had been visiting my brother at a venue in Edinburgh where they had a run in the Festival, afterwards there was a function late into the night and I drove home, I think somewhere between 1 and 2 am. It was announced on the radio she’d been injured in a crash and when I woke next morning it had been announced she’d died.

I was also watching tv, having brunch and getting ready for a back shift when the news cut to the twin towers, watching as it is developed from what seemed like an accident to very deliberate to disaster when the towers collapsed. The second one I listed to live on radio as I drove into work.

9/11 certainly. I was in town pre-holiday shopping and a big crowd was around the window front of a TV selling shop. I was curious and wondered what movie they were all agog at. It was only when I got home that I saw the news. Heartbreaking ❤️‍🩹. Really didn’t feel like going on holiday.

I saw it live. I was at work but I worked for an IT company and the developers all had Sky streaming on their PCs (new connections couldn't get on because the servers couldn't cope and I think only Sky was broadcasting it live) so we all gathered round various desks to see what was going on. In theory to watch the news reports but in reality we saw the second tower get hit.

I happened to be going out for dinner that night and the restaurant was very subdued but you could tell it was all anyone was talking about.

It didn't feel horrific though because it seemed so far away, unreal and detached from us. The next few days really made the world feel a lot smaller!

I didn’t see major disasters live apart from 9/11, the horror of which didn’t even register at first.

So if I can low-rent it right down, that awful Jade Goody and her little posse of bitches bullying Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother. I always remembered how dignified how Shilpa remained.

I was going to say Tommy cooper too ….. the fact that the audience were laughing as they thought it was part of the act, and then somebody pulling the curtain round him. It may not have been the worst thing I’ve seen (like most say 9/11 was absolutely the worst event) but Tommy cooper was the first I ever saw.

The Rwanda massacre. The ambulance taking Diana to hospital. Tiananmen Square.

There was the Bradford Fire, King’s Cross fire and Piper Alpha all were shown live stream on tv news.

There's no way these were live streamed.

I was coming on to say Ayrton Senna crash - parents liked watching races but they'd popped to the shop and I'd left TV on live race - they walked in asked about race few minutes after it happened.

9/11 it was second plane we saw- in office meeting room TV was put on as company had contacts on one of the planes in parent company - we were based in USA, Swiss and UK office -smallish IT company and all the computer screens were pretty quckily pointed at all the news websites - which kept crashing.

Greenfield tower fire.

The Bradford stadium fire, seeing a person fully on fire stagger onto the pitch…

Challenger. It went down on my birthday.

Billy Mongers racing car crash. Followed that kid since junior ginettas. When his car ploughed into the back of the stationary car and the commentary went silent you knew it was bad.

Herald of free Enterprise. That gave me nightmares for weeks. How could you leave the door open?