TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

Could be that, they wouldn't bother or wouldn't have the edit facilities to put on a new countdown.


Talking of adverts and local ends, one of the outgoing KRS circuits for years was fed out to virtually every TV station twice a week for something called the BACC (Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre) playout. This was how some adverts were sent out to broadcasters, in particular last minute ones and late changes.

As I understand it the various edit facilities in Soho played out the ads in turn to LWT who co-ordinated the playout and sent them out of one of their lines to everyone.

'bluecortina' might know, but I don't think TVS operated split ads on C4, they only did that on ITV ? Also, I don't
think Channel inserted any ads on C4, they just passed through the off air feed from C4 Rowridge, and TVS paid them a percentage of the revenue (same deal as the national ads on ITV)

I don't think the C4 playout suite at TVS had any dedicated facilities to transmit captions or breakdown music. That wasn't required for breakdowns during ad breaks, because C4's Pres in London produced a 'fallback' output (as was seen regularly in some regions in the first few months of C4, because of the Equity dispute for C4 ads) and it's odd that wasn't used in the clip.

There was a major London to Southampton BT link failure in 1987 that lasted an hour. Nothing was available
from C4 London at all, and (apart from the ad breaks themselves !) there was black and silence for 20 - 30 mins, until TVS managed to cobble together an apology caption and music.

Yorkshire's circuits were/are labelled YOT, I believe.

I think it was fairly usual to have a circuit from Thames/LWT available when originating programmes locally in case there was a newsflash from ITN.

It seems here that BT managed to plug the circuit that should have gone to YTV into the transmitters in place of the feed from Kirkstall Road. Possibly lucky it was just colour bars on that circuit!

That's not the sort of fault that would be the result of the transmission or distribution. Once it's encoded into MPEG for transmission it would be blocky rather than liney. That's more a fault in the uncompressed SDI domain as is a loss of sync

Yes, Channel 4 wouldn't have even known there was a problem, the adverts are being put in way downstream of them and there wouldn't be an off air feed of every region at C4.

Also they wouldn't care, its TVS's airtime to fill so if there's a problem then it's their problem, not C4's


It's odd how the Croft advert had a countdown, I thought when ad breaks were run from film they were spliced together into one 3 minute film, not run as seperate reels

I wonder if the film leader was at the beginning of the advert on an ACR25 cart (i.e. the inserts were played in off cart, but had a film leader if they were transferred from film?). Could be that TVS had an ACR25 set-up and played individual ads from carts rather than comping?

Could be that, they wouldn't bother or wouldn't have the edit facilities to put on a new countdown.


Talking of adverts and local ends, one of the outgoing KRS circuits for years was fed out to virtually every TV station twice a week for something called the BACC (Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre) playout. This was how some adverts were sent out to broadcasters, in particular last minute ones and late changes.

As I understand it the various edit facilities in Soho played out the ads in turn to LWT who co-ordinated the playout and sent them out of one of their lines to everyone.

I'm loving the frustration at the end there. Name-checking Thames -- obviously their error -- in an almost unprofessional way, classic!

C4 did care, insofar they wanted their output to look very professional at all times. They never wanted the ITV companies injecting their ads downstream of their HQ but that was the only way to do it. If you made a cock up locally and C4 saw it they’d be on that phone in the blink of an eye. Fact.

The brief period I was involved in commercial playout they were in the evenings, maybe Tuesday and Friday? And always from LWT then as Thames had gone.... in fact I was at Thames seeing them come into us

Did they have off airs of all the regions or did they just notice the ones they could get in London?