TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

This one fascinates me. Play Your Cards Right falls off the air and prompts an error slide. After an apology during the credits, they can't seem to get rid of the LWT endcap and struggle to get the ad break to start, and it turns out PYCR was harder to get rid of than initially thought. The nature of these problems seem like something I'd associate more with a dodgy automation system like when BBC Breakfast wouldn't come off air and kept cutting back to the studio after it finished. But I'm assuming back in 1981, nothing like that was in place.

I notice another PYCR VT clock appears after the LWT endcap- possibly multiple episodes on the same tape?

That blue "Independent Television" slide - am I right in thinking this was generated at the transmitter and possibly cut in automatically after a period of dead air?

This one looks to me as if there was some sort of failure in presentation that prevented vision from leaving out to the transmitters. The engineers will have been able to get the programme and ads out via a backup system (which might have been as simple as unplugging presentation's output and plugging it directly into the VTR feed!), but any other presentation video was out of the question, so where the promos/announcer stuff would have been there was just black with no sync (hence the transmitter text appearing again after the break).

IIRC the uploader mentions that LWT had similar issues with nothing but programme and ads going out for a while after this clip, which would back up the idea that something went badly wrong and a component needed to be replaced.

I also think the uploader of the video has mucked about with it a bit, as the audio of PYCR the second time has dropouts at exactly the same times as the version at the start, so I think they have dubbed that part over the video for reasons only known to themselves.

I think I remember that night. PYCR fell off the air for the whole network. I was watching on Southern.
I switched over to LWT, and it seemed to me either the station router or the pres mixer had totally died, because there were long non video and non sync periods (that as seen caused the IBA caption to be triggered multiple times)
I think they must have been manually patching to both local Tx and network the relevant VTs and Cart Machines. A real mess, that lasted until the final break at 21:40 during (I think) The Gentle Touch.
And no ability to do any local pres or voice overs to apologise

It was less messy as seen on the rest of the network, but my word the other 14 pres control rooms must have been tence !

I think I do remember this night myself... I'm pretty sure the end of PYCR was lost completely on Tyne Tees, they did not go back to it, and ISTR that they went into the three parts of TGT late as well (just a few seconds clipped each time), with some kind of apology at the end.

One that went down in the annals of LWT technical problems (there weren't that many to be honest). A complete failure of the presentation vision desk. Much over patching in Lines/MCR to get anything out. Never forgotten by those involved I understand. At the time the networking desk was part of the presentation desk so fault in one part may lead to a fault in another making local transmission and networking very difficult under the circumstances. The staff involved did extremely well on the night. In a later technical re-incarnation the main outgoing networking circuit was fed by a retained CDL desk whilst local transmission moved over to a very unique GVG 300 desk and additionally many output circuits could be fed by many different desks at the press of a button.

Very interesting, and thanks for confirming 37 years later !!!

I hope this doesn’t sound ridiculous, but I wonder if there’s been any research on viewer retention during breakdowns? I’d assume during a pre-recorded programme most people would channel surf, but they’d be less inclined to do so when watching a major live event, such as sport, that they are more invested in watching.

We all like it on here when a breakdown happens and the announcer gets to say ‘In the meantime, here’s some music’, but I wouldn’t be surprised if by that stage it’s only us still watching!

Yes, it was. There were a couple of preset captions too, another one stating there was an industrial dispute.

It cut in automatically, during scheduled programme hours., but was inhibited at close-down, because lack of syncs from the studio centre was used to shut the transmitters down.

The IBA could also manually control (from one of their four regional control rooms) the caption generator, and the same crate at the primary tx sites also generated the ETP-1 test card.

C4/S4C transmitters had the same facilities. The ETP-1 card that was normally seen on C4 was generated at Charlotte St, this had horizontal lines above and below the IBA CH4 ident. The Tx site versions didn't
have the lines, (in order to easily identify the source of the signal)

I'm surprised that in that kind of situation they didn't commandeer a studio gallery to run local pres from. Not ideal but I would have thought it would have been a bit better than the overpatching solution once it became that it was not a trivial problem.

Perhaps that's what eventually happened after a couple of hours ? It's difficult, with no advance planning
or routing arrangements be back on the air from another part of the building after five minutes, even in the less complex tx environment of the early 80s.

The World of Sport gallery would have been the natural choice probably for that role ?