TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

Never recorded it, but Anita MacNaught wasn’t ready for her broadcast and then realised and swore live on air Oh s*** then bbc world pres cut to a breakdown slide then 20 secs later she carried on as normal like nothing ever happened.

Another Thames one I was told was that they used to compile the ad breaks during the preceeding programme part (which is fairly hairy knowing the machine they use to do it) and one of the operators was always a bit keen on housekeeping the old breaks out of the database and yes inevitably one day ended up deleting the next few ad breaks too.


I've mentioned before about a very high profile programme which was such a late edit that it was to be played in live from the edit suite, and watching it rewinding and cueing during the ident



I'm the opposite, I find watching breakdowns very annoying as I want to know what is happening. Nothing like being on duty in MCR and noticing a breakdown slide on air.... then the realisation that the thing that's fallen off air is one of yours. Shortly followed by phones ringing and talkbacks bursting into life while you rummage around for people to phone to find out what the hecks happened to your programme*


Multiple breakdowns are fun. I had one last year when a couple of channels fell over during one nightshift, we sorted that out as best we could. Then while we were taking the inevitable phone calls from managers and writing the fault logs up the major OB on another channel fell off air and then came back. We hadn't even noticed it, first we knew was when playout called to ask what happened. Cue another round of phone calls and log writing


*Because the thing is that despite the name, 'Master Control' often don't actually have much control, most of the time fixing a fault with an OB is phone bashing. Something which production types often don't get - a news channel I worked at had one MCR operator and news editors who would didn't understand that when a live 2-way has gone down, phoning MCR isn't going to help as MCR is on the phone to someone who can fix it

Yes I've seen that. It wasn't so much that she wasn't ready it was that she didn't have her earpiece in so was just sitting there typing when the bulletin started (like most news channels the bulletins are 'clock start'). You see her look up at the monitor and see herself on air then realise why she can't hear anything

That very likely happened. The buttons for the studio light and microphone were right beside each other on the desk - and I’ve seen a few examples of announcers hitting the wrong one in error. It could get very warm under the light, so usually it was only turned on when required.

Here’s an example of Bill Steel turning off the light prematurely when the next programme arrived a few seconds late:

I remember when the big breakfast went off air for about half an hour. Channel 4 filled with The Clangers of all things and then ITN did an extended big breakfast news, which is impressive given they cant have had much in the way of resources to do that.

Without knowing the precise details, in my experience it looks like the replay vt machine (1”) is having difficulty with its capstan servo - this is the servo controlling the linear tape speed. For whatever reason (damaged tape or an electronic fault?) the linear tape speed has reduced or become ‘hesitant’ and that’s why you can hear the audio ‘wowing’ and appearing to ‘slur’. The machine is trying to re-lock the servo. why does it appear to be out of sync? - the video coming off the replay heads is also hesitant because the linear tape speed is not constant or correct - you could think of it as the vision equivalent of wow and slur, but, the video side of the machine is very clever and even though the video is also being replayed in a mistimed fashion, the replay heads on the vt machine can be deflected to try and compensate for that mistiming. In other words, the mechanical mistiming of the directly replayed video being caused by the servo problem can be partly compensated for by the video heads being deflected to try and overcome that servo mechanical mistiming. There will also be an electronic timebase corrector in the signal chain that is electronically trying to compensate for that too! So, you can see there is lots of processing going on to try and keep that video ‘steady as she goes’. But it can all only do so much! and you can see the video too gets ‘beyond’ hope and there are many video disturbances as the machine is trying its very best as it can to re-lock the capstan servo to keep replaying stable pictures. The audio takes second place in the vt machine’s set of priorities and the vt is happy in itself that if it can get the video right then the audio will be right too! That’s why the audio sounds as it does - the vt machine is not interested in it, and will do whatever it needs to do to get the capstan servo to relock properly and get the linear tape speed correct and stable. The human eye is not very sensitive to picture disturbances and you can get away with a lot. The human ear on the other hand is incredibly sensitive to pitch/wow and flutter for example and if any of those parameters ‘goes wrong’ you will become acutely aware of it very very quickly. Just a guess though, based on my own experiences.

I'm pretty sure I've seen the Neville Wanless clip but I can't remember where. Seem to think it was the start of a news summary read from the pres studio.



Is that the same show that once had to evacuate TV Theatre during the recording due to an IRA bomb threat, so pres played out the first half (recorded on a VT machine at TV Centre) and crossed their fingers that they were back in the building to pick up and do the rest of the show live?

On that theme, there was a Question Time, back when it was live, which had to be abandoned due to a similar evacuation. Apparently the links engineers, who were in a vehicle in the underground car park, only found out about the emergency when they saw BBC1 go into the breakdown routine on their off-air monitor and they called CAR...

GMTV had no end of "technical problems" as such with the regions over the years, this late opt-out crashed into a report which then had a knock-on effect of crashing back into GMTV at the end of the bulletin:


GMTV and the ad-break that never was:


And finally for now, presenting in the dark when for some reason all the lights go out at GMTV one morning:

I wonder if anyone has the one video where the Fire Alarm went off during GMTV

I remember them going off for quite a long time and them showing an episode of The Banana Splits, and when they came back, Chris claimed that a garden gnome had pulled out one of the plugs in the house.

Pages from Ceefax, 1999. Someone has forgotten to set the page to 152!

That was That's Life, that story is mentioned in the link that Steve W posted: http://www.tech-ops.co.uk/pres/page2.html