TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

They had no way of seeing at Charlotte St anything other than Crystal Palace off air.

However, a number of their technical staff lived in the Anglia and TVS regions

Did that include VT clocks/film leaders for each ad? I know it's been said that Monday's Newcomers didn't include the clocks so would have been of limited use as a distribution method.

No, it didn't ! It just looked like one very long ad break in the middle of five hours worth of test card.
I checked Oxford and CP, they just carried on with the test card, so it was something TVS specific

I have asked, they believe the midweek comms exchange was on a Tues or Thurs night and that it was controlled by LWT - just as well I asked and you are correct.

There was also a Saturday morning comms session and of course the Thursday morning promotion exchange around ITV controlled by ATV/Central. Apparently LWT charged per commercial for their services, I'm not at liberty to say how much, but it appears to have been very lucrative!

There's an engineer at Tower who occasionally refers to them as the 'Jimi Hendrix' lines.

BT Sport is HUB, for the BT Sport Production Hub (not to be confused with the big tower in the studio, which is also known as the Hub; the now-axed news show, SportsHUB; or the BT HomeHub and BusinessHub broadband routers.)

Last seen as 'commuter on train platform' in a Haribo advert

I’m guessing he (the presenter) was not aware that there was a fault either that or it was a recorded programme.

See, given where they are based - I would have put a few pennies (and obviously lost them) on BT Sport lines
to have labeled them up with the code 'IBC'

You may be able to confirm or refute a theory I have about promo or ad exchanges during weekday mornings. I know that in the 70s and very early 80s there was a mid-morning gap in schools broadcasts between approx 10.30 and 11.00 when the network was used for the distribution of ads/promos to the regions. Regions either scheduled their own programmes or showed a locally-generated “interlude” during this gap. From about 1981, the gap no longer appeared in schools broadcasts, though there were often intervals of approx 5 minutes around 11.00, where it was not uncommon for regions to show their own caption and play their own music, rather than take the standard schools interval sequence from ATV/Central. Could this be because the network was being used for some sort of promo or ad distribution during the convenient 5-minute break? The “local junctions” seemed to appear at regular times each week, when there was no other reason (eg local programmes) not to take the network feed. In fact, I witnessed Tyne Tees even opt out of a lengthy networked apology caption/sequence during the Thames strike of 1984 at exactly the point where a programme junction would have normally appeared, and then rejoin the sequence some five minutes later!

Ahhh actually the Saturday morning one does ring a bell, I didn't normally do Saturdays so only saw it a few times.


I think they charged for refeeds. I remember that if you missed an advert or for some reason there was a fault with your recording you phoned them up and the ad you wanted was replayed at the end.

It was something you didn't want to happen particularly as they handily put a caption up before it the reference commercial so the rest of the TV industry knew who had messed up!

I guess sending them through LWT made sense, seeing as they were off air at the time and wouldn't be broadcasting anything else.

This was caused by a faulty LGK card (https://www.grassvalley.com/products/lgk-3901/) (according to the Transmission report which affected DTT only)