The TV Question Amnesty Thread

For most stations the same silence detector at the transmtter goes back to studio output when audio returns.

For BBC Network radio, the backup is at Broadcasting House rather than each transmitter having its own. To get back on air cleanly, the studio (or the studio taking over from the one that died) needs to:

Contact London Control Room and get a feed of the emergency tape as an Outside Source
Fade up that OS and set the levels
Ask LCR to put the studio on air
Fade out the emergency tape and carry on.

A bit of a faff, so there is usually an emergency playlist or similar available in the studio so in the event of an evacuation they can play the local copy and get back to normal much more quickly afterwards.

Yes, I think it was the BBC where I heard it was tricky (Radio 1 in particular, I think it was in reference to one of the presenters (either Chris Moyles or Mark and Lard IIRC) playing "emergency tape chicken" by trying to be silent just short enough so the tape didn't kick in... and failed).

That was definitely a Moyles feature, not sure if it ever did kick in though.

Chris Moyles once had a morning when the fire alarm went off but because it happened without the listeners hearing it they played the emergency tape from the studio. They got out the building, came back in when they had the all clear, faded out the tape at the end of a song and then carried on without anyone noticing.

Until a while later the fire alarm went off again, this time audibly on air. So they had to play the emergency tape and thus the listeners heard the same tunes again.

http://chrismoyles.net/soundvault/soundvault.php?fileid=1088

During that clip you'll hear him open the mic briefly with the bell going off while he is trying to get the emergency "tape" to play from the studio, presumably to stop the silence detector kicking in so the studio stayed in control.

Before computer playout, they used to have a minidisc in the studio for emergency use. I don't think this is apocraphyl, but apparently one morning somebody burned the toast and Simon Mayo dutifully put that disc on and evacuated, only to discover that before he left the station, Nicky Campbell had replaced the emergency disc with "The Best of the Nicky Campbell Show" for a prank.

No, I think his producers always bottled it.


I don't remember Mark and Lard doing it, though they had more than their fair share of breakdowns, I think the end of their penultimate show was ended early by the line going down.

I think Jon Holmes has played emergency tape chicken in the past (not his most notorious radio feature though, that is Swearword Hangman)

This is certainly the case with BBC stations, as 5 Live has demonstrated on at least two occasions:

A few years back Charlie Sloth managed to take Radio 1 off air by hitting some sort of emergency studio shutdown button as he was being wheeled out of the studio at the end of Scott Mills show (as they used to often do when he was on drivetime on 1Xtra). I seem to remember it transpired that it happened just as they began to play-out a promo in the studio, and through some weird quirk the promo went out as normal but there was silence until the emergency tape kicked in!

Tony Currie could be right up here.

When Chris Evans had to evacuate Radio 2 back in 2015, he played the next track on the system and left the studio. There was then a good 90 seconds of silence before the emergency tape kicked in. I felt at the time that this was an interesting way of dealing with it, rather than instead playing out the 'emergency tape' from the studio itself as there was 90 seconds of silence broadcast on Radio 2 and this was protocol!

The chair knocked the switch that turned off the power to the studio.


In a modern studio the computers and equipment in the studio are just controls for the playout systems which are elsewhere. So presumably the playout server continued playing whatever was on air at the time... but then the computer telling it what to play next had been depowered so it sat there waiting for a command

In our wonderful tapeless studio facility, we've got an HDCam deck and a couple of IMX players. Recently none would play any Digibeta tapes, and our head of technology (a former post-production engineer) was clearly delighted to roll up his sleeves and try to diagnose the fault. The troubleshooting process involved having to find the only Betacam tape in the building.

I believe the exact name of the feature was 'Swearing Radio Hangman for the Under 12s'