Tommy Cooper's jokes in his last perfomance

Yes, there was a feed of the training available to broadcasters, and it did include Nodar Kumaritashvili’s crash fairly graphically, but not anything beyond that. There were no ‘RAI style’ close ups and - I don’t think - any replays. To the credit Of the host broadcaster they immediately realised how serious it was.

I’m not sure what, if any, pictures the BBC used but if anything from the run was shown it’d have been freeze framed well before the impact.

Although attitudes have changed. I didn’t see Senna’s crash live and for years, but I did see the brief report the BBC did in place of the highlights of the race. For years I was convinced I’d never seen the crash because it wasn’t shown live. A while ago that later programme showed up online- it includes the crash, all the way to the impact and I think some of the further out helicopter shots. Now you might show the car going off, but you certainly wouldn’t show the impact.

When Fabrice Muamba collapsed during the FA Cup Quarter Final in 2012 the game was being shown live by (the UK) ESPN. They kept to very very wide shots without any detail and actually mostly showed the crowd. It was down to the commentators to give some idea of what was going on and how serious it was. I remember listening to 5 Live (at first Sports Extra, as there was a Six Nations game on 5 Live), I think it was Ian Dennis and David Pleat who did a very good job of describing what was going on without constantly giving graphic details.

Also RTE operated a cable television company from 1970 onward, relaying BBC One, BBC Two and ITV, so I assume they must have direct feeds to BBC and ITV to enable the running of their cable company back then.

That must have been a real boon to Irish viewers. Didn’t RTE have only one channel until the late 1970’s?

Possibly, but more likely they’d have been big antenna setups for clear off air reception. A direct feed would have been eye wateringly expensive then.

What would have been on the direct line from the BBC would have been different to what you’d want / need for cable relay.

RTE had one channel from Dec 31st 1961 until their second channel launched on November 2nd 1978.

RTE Relays was the name of their cable company, started to cable Dublin from 1970 onward and offered RTE Television, BBC One Northern Ireland, BBC Two Northern Ireland and Ulster Television, and also provided Channel 4 from November 1982.

The sole RTE channel was always derided by some in the Irish media as "zone of ignorance", as RTE filled their sole channel with an abundance of crap US imports, really old films, and some decent British programmes too. RTE 2 was launched to offer choice to the people in "one channel land" and they did a reasonable job with the limited budget.

Agree with the sentiment about cultural differences between countries around showing distressing images during sport, which extends to less serious instances than those discussed so far. "That injury was so horrific we've decided not to show you a replay" has almost become a cliché in British sports commentary, but one usually used for good reason, while when taking in feeds from some other countries (including the US, I've found) it seems the rule is the more gruesome the injury, the more they'll show the replay.

Switching gears slightly. Years ago there was a documentary on the BBC about Al Jazeera. IIRC they showed an Aljazeera clip of the second (or third depending on your perspective) Gulf War which showed the bodies of two British RAF members. The faces were pixellated.

AIUI the BBC pixellated the faces whilst Al Jazeera didn't. Its not just sport that has cultural differences

I seem to recall from the Hillsborough inquest that the BBC had a VT truck there, and were, or were quickly able to record 'iso cam' shots from a few key cameras.

Today OB trucks are equipped with USB stick recorders that take multiple feeds from individual cameras. Not for any broadcast use, but for any security and public safety issues

Without digging out old diagrams, I'm fairly sure that the only feeds from the BBC to RTE back then would have been a single microwave link from Belfast. It may be that it was a main and spare which could be used independently if all was well.
Bear in mind that there was also the issue getting material to Belfast from England / Wales / Scotland - the BBC only had one link north from Manchester to Carlisle that also fed Glasgow and Newcastle.
It was possible to book at a high cost per minute a BT Protection circuit, but the idea that RTE had access to seperate camera feeds from Hillsborough is fanciful back in the 1980s. It would have been the scanner output - maybe a world feed if such a thing existed, but more likely not!

Although there of course one factor is that they were RAF pilots. I wonder if the BBC would have been a bit less careful if they were Iraqi pilots? Not because they are deemed less important, just that they are broadcasting to the pilots home country.

You're right that there are cultural differences, the attitude to death and the dead is very different in other countries where people have to deal with it directly a lot more than us in the west. It was very different for previous generations in this country of course

Al Jazeera English is staffed by a lot of former BBC, ITN and Sky people so tends to work to western, mainly British levels of taste. Plus they're licensed by Ofcom so have to stick to their rules