Funniest news moments

Not sure whether it was funny, or just toe-curlingly embarrassing, but the very first edition of Central News South was a whole half-hour of car crash telly. Their then state of the art hard drive playout system crashed, and they were left with only about two reports going out successfully. Even the opening titles failed to play.

I think the autocue had gone down as well, as I remember Ann Dawson at one point saying, "Please bear with me whilst I find my script." Thankfully Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards was a studio guest... and boy did they get their money's worth out of him. I think he was interviewed at least three times during the course of the programme.

Oh, and BTW, sorry to be a pain in the arras pedant, but it's "Funniest" or "Most funny", not "Most funniest". Thank you.

It's the comedian Tim Vine (brother of Jeremy and holder of the world record for telling the most jokes in an hour), it's the sort of thing he does. He could have just waited until someone passed him the pen, but that wouldn't be funny!

As for the funniest moment; it's very hard to beat the clip of Guy Mitchelmore dropping his cup of water 20 seconds before transmission and having to wipe all the water off the desk with his papers. If anyone has that please could they post it up somewhere as I've lost my copy.

There's been quite a few recently; Sarah Muckagee standing next to a horse in the new forest and the News 24 presenter handing to her by saying that Sarah was 'the one on the left'. Emily Maitlis helplessly corpsing a couple of weeks ago was a very funny moment.

ISTR one occassion in 2003 when News At Ten was playing the closing credits and they had to swap presenters, the presenter for NaT was I believe John Suchet and the next presenter on the NC was Alastair Stewart, and he walked on the set mid-credits and then walked back off realised that the programme was still on the air for everyone to see.

BBC North West tend to have their fair share of cock-up's due to old and rather naff technology. There was one lunchtime in 2002 or 2003 when they played the BBC One ident with the music to NWT (2002 generic BBC Regional News Theme) and then the ident stopped and started to rewind live on air and then cut to the Headlines with a rather bemused Gordon Burns at the helm.

And don't forget the time when poor Anna Ford lost her voice on the One O'Clock News and then had to swap to Sophie Raworth at the last minute half way through the programme.

If I remember rightly it was actually John who was on next, with Sir Trev. giving him a royal flap of the hand and John doing a 180 dash back off set.

There was also the interviewee on News 24 Sunday who made a fuss trying to get his mic off during the (invision) closing titles, before promptly and absolutely freezing like a statue when he took a glance at the monitor.

Moz, if I am not mistaken, the cap below is the actual opening cap from the Bulletin in question, lesbians and all. You can see that Nicholas Witchell is on the telephone asking for help (one assumes), and there is some evidence of someone moving around just to the right hand side of Sue Lawley, as we look at the cap. What a pro though. She carried on as though nothing was happening.







http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/lesbian_invasion_copy1.jpg

Absolutely correct. Nicholas was on the phone to security at the time he's said. I remember watching that at the time and wondering what was going on. Initially I thought the shouting was some kind of bleed-through from the gallery.

I can imagine the call:

Security: Hello Security
NW: It's Nick Witchell here, from the newsroom
Security: Aren't you on air?
NW: There are lesbians chained to the newsdesk
Security: Oh, you're not kidding!

Are there any videoclips around of the actual event? I seem to remember seeing one of Sue Lawley's apology with the camera and window graphic all very badly aligned

This happened a long, long time before hard drive playout systems - I think it was in 1988 or 89. The playout system in use was, I believe, a Betacart linked to their newsroom computer system (Newstar??). A part of this system apparently failed. One theory I heard was that a tape wouldn't go into one of the Betacart's players, and the system kept trying to re-insert it, whilst refusing to do anything else. Whether this is true or not, I have no idea!

Gareth,

If you go to TV World and the BBC News menu, you will find a video upload of the lesbian invasion on the Six. The stills below are capped from that video. Credits to www.TVWorld. Link below.

http://home.clara.net/jim.edwards/nb.htm

http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/lawley_1.jpghttp://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/lawley_2.jpghttp://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/lawley_3.jpg

As I remember, nothing crashed, apart from Camera 1 having to be physically man-handled and "bounced" out of the studio because one of the Lesbians had handcuffed herself to it.

At the time of the lesbians invasion, Hi-band uMatic was the standard tape format used in News. BetaCart has never been used (AFAIK) for BBC national news, only very recently have they gone over to server play-out. However, BetaCart was introduced to BBC World Service TV News from launch day. It got its data from journalists entering info into the then newsroom computer system ENPS"]BASYS. This data was then interpreted by a computer running in-house software called BigCart, which told Betacart which tape to find and lace.

I've got a video and audio clip of the gallery talkback during the Six O'Clock News lesbians incident. Here they are:

Video

Audio

Enjoy!

Better stil before "Newsnight" BBC 2 used to run a programme called something like "Tonight". Longish film reports then studio discussion.

Imagine the scene:

Opening titles then presenter (from memory may have been Ludovic Kennedy) links to film.
About a miniute in a film join breaks on the telecine machine.
Director cuts to presenter whos holding a roll in one hand and a glass of milk in the other pus a mouthful of said food.
He then had to swallow the food and with eyes watering tried to apologise and continue.

I've never seen that again presumably as it was not recorded, it was a hoot.