In his memoirs, 'When One Door Closes', Sissons says that when the Queen Mother died on March 30, 2002, rather than giving a lead to the nation, the BBC had decided to see which way the wind was blowing before responding fully to the death of the former Monarch at 101, the 'Daily Mail' said.
"I was the newscaster that day. I read the bulletin at midday. There then wasn't much to do until the 5.15 PM report. The time began to drag a little. We prepared the normal Saturday early evening bulletin, which went out uneventfully at 5.15 and lasted 12 minutes.
"When I got back to my desk from the studio, the atmosphere was suddenly electric. I was told by the weekend editor -- a middle-ranking editorial supervisor who usually kept out of the way -- that the Queen Mother had died. I would be back on the air very shortly to announce it.
"She had, it turned out, died at 3.15. The first to be told was Jennie Bond, the BBC's royal correspondent, who was informed by Buckingham Palace on an embargoed basis.
"The head of news in turn contacted as many of the BBC's top tier as he could, emphasising to everyone that the Palace would not make the formal announcement until 5.45, which meant the BBC could not broadcast the news before then.
"Now, any reasonable person would have thought that the editor of the day and the duty newscaster would also have been let in on the secret, so that they could prepare the broadcast they would have to make when the Palace gave the green light. Astonishingly, we were kept in the dark.
"Looking back, I still can't believe that we were given only 20 minutes notice of such a broadcast, when the BBC had been privy to the knowledge of the Queen Mother's death for more than an hour and a half," he writes.