A timely honour from the Queen for broadcaster Holmes

The ceremony was watched on television by 27 million people in the UK and listened to by another 11 million people on the radio.

The size of the screen audience was remarkable, given that only a few years before, after World War Two, a tiny percentage of then 50 million population even had a TV.

In the intervening decades television has grown and grown, and is still going strong in the internet age, even though its future shape is unclear.

It was fitting, therefore, that Eamonn Holmes yesterday was being given an OBE by Her Majesty for his services to broadcasting. Holmes is a much loved presenter across the UK, having broadcast nationally since 1986, first for the BBC, but from 1993 for GMTV, then Sky. Breakfast television was then still fairly new, having only begun in 1983.

But Holmes was already popular here in Northern Ireland, where he began his career at UTV at the end of the 1970s, when he was barely out of his teens. Like Gloria Hunniford, with whom he worked with at UTV, his friendly style would win fans across the nation.

He joked with the Queen yesterday that he has interviewed every royal except her. Humour aside, the fact that he has talked to so many key public figures is testimony to his broadcasting longevity, spanning almost 40 years of the 65 since that seminal coverage of the Queen’s crowning.