TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

in fairness most people consider clowns to be creepy because of the make-up the act requires (its so easy to go overboard with it though), though productions like IT don't really help the reputation of clowns as a whole, and puppet clowns are just freaks of nature.

Comedy Central has just froze during "Your Face or Mine" and did the director's cut to a test card.

Edit: It has now cut to an ad-break. No apologies for the fault.

Now here's something I have just found on Youtube. It's the Heaven Can Wait breakdown from 1996 but with the continuity going into the breakdown and the closedown after the replacement film Timescape.

The continuity going into the breakdown:

Closedown after the film Timescape:

Great find! I'd still love to know what prevented them to play Heaven Can Wait given they were seconds away from transmitting it, and if the background noise at 5:29 gives any clue to the matter.

That background noise sounds like some sort of tape rewinding or possibly a cartridge being laced, maybe the tapes for the breakdown music?

That menu read was obviously a fill to give them more time to sort out the problem, I suppose once he got to Inside Story they thought they'd fixed it.

You wouldn't hear anything to do with the problem with the film from the announcer's booth, but he was playing the music so probably something to do with that. Not sure if it would've been coming from carts or CDs at that point (in the early days of the Broom Cupboard you used to see the record turntable!)

Something else I've just noticed is Timescape being referred to as a "short film" despite (according to Wikipedia) only being two minutes shorter than Heaven Can Wait.

Can you tell I'm procrastinating this afternoon?

I'm sure we've already discussed this same breakdown in this thread, but this is BBC Wales dealing with it.

It sounds like something cueing up in the booth. By then it wouldn't have been the old Broom Cupboard but the then new transmission area, the NTA. I'd assume by 1996 they'd be using CD players, can't see why they'd have installed cart.


Almost certainly something went wrong with the tape, this would have been a D3 cassette played out from the VT area in the NTA playout area

The only reason why they would abandon a proramme like that is because the tape was damaged. My guess is that the fault happened or was only noticed when the tape was stood up/readied to play (which IIRC the automation did at 2 minutes beforehand). Maybe the machine chewed the tape or got stuck in the machine? The presumably extra trails and menu were stalling for time.


Incidently I remember one incident when I worked in playout where the power failed in a bay that contained the D3 format VT machines for one of the digital channels (the main format in that TX area was Digibeta). One of the machines was on air at the time unfortunately so the tape was stuck in the machine.

The solution was to unscrew and unplug the machine and lift it out of the bay, take it over to a wall socket on the other side of the room, plug it in and eject the tape.... then leg it downstairs to the analogue TX area and play it from there. Quick thinking but of course the tape was still intact

I wonder how that film was chosen, there wouldn't have been one scheduled as a back up.


They had a little library of standby tapes so presumably it was one of those. I don't remember there being full feature films in there, maybe that's where the confusion over the length came from, theyd usually introduce a standby as a short film

Presumably there were phone calls to a duty scheduler or channel management during Timescape which is how they got the new slot for Heaven Can Wait

Did BBC Wales ever manage to show Heaven Can Wait in its entirely? This is the aftermath of Llandaff losing the network feed in 1992.

Eh, it fell off air 4 years earlier? Some sort of jinx on it!