TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

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 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 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.

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.

At least it wasn't caused by avoidable human error that led to them missing a crucial goal. Twice.

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...

Although there were two different causes - the first being an ad break after News at Ten that should have been rescheduled when the match went to extra time. Didn't some areas get back to the game quicker than others?

The England goal being missed - as big an error as it was - only affected ITV1 HD, at time when maybe 10 or 20% of the audience had access to it.

Because I was obsessed with The Big Breakfast at the start I vividly remember both of those. The latter was on St Patrick's Day 1993, which I remember because when they came back, they cut to a plug socket with a leprechaun doll they'd been playing around with all morning next to it. It was off for about ten minutes and I remember when they did the phone-in competition later, Chris asked one of the callers what C4 had done while they were away and the caller said "they played some awful music".

The former was in 1995, when Gaby and Mark were presenting. I remember at 7am they went to the news and then couldn't get back from it, and Peter Smith stayed on screen - I can remember him repeating stuff he was being fed down his earpiece. Then it went back to C4 continuity, flitting between standby stuff like The Clangers, old clips and the news. I remember listening to Chris Evans on Radio 1 during it and he said people were phoning up to say they were showing clips of him. Then as you say, there was an extended news bulletin with full reports, presumably taken off the Morning News or something, before they finally went back to the house at about five to eight. Went on for ages.