BBC2 Closedowns over Christmas

Hm, suprised that BBC2 aren't looking to show comedy every night over the period like last year - iirc you had you're comedy from 12-2am and then usually a half decent film of some sort.

I'm sure I read somewhere BBC2 plan to do "Stay up with 2" again this year.

Last year it was two comedy series reruns then I Love 1980s and the year before that was I Love 1970s so I'm guessing we'll see I Love 1990s after soem comedy reruns.

In early guides it says that they're showing i love the 70's again. Perhaps the 90's version wasn't as successful as the others.

Perhaps they might do the rebroadcast tests like last year. That was around the middle of December.

That was the case defiantly in the early 90s, though defianly by 1996 BBC1 had stopped showing TCF after closedown and just played tone over a black screen.

I believe the old way of closing down BBC TV was to press a button which removed part of the signal (either the syncs or the vision, I can't remember) which would then trigger everything to close

An acquaintance of mine who was a BBC network director in the early 80s says that the first task of the day was to insert a U-link which sent black-and-burst to the transmitters. This is what woke up Crystal Palace, and the other transmitters were then woken up in sequence, one triggering the next. It took about 20 minutes for the entire transmitter network to come on-line.

Next job was to switch on the BBC-1 globe and get the engineer in racks to tweak the synthesised chroma and luma settings, something that would have to happen a number of times throughout the day, as the equipment was analogue and very prone to drift.

Those were the days, Glorfi.

If the guy was a couple of minutes late for work, that poor bloke in the croft on the little island in the Hebrides lost the top of the first programme because his local relay-of-a-relay-of-a-relay hadn't switched on in time.

Anyone remember those nice slide shows we sometimes got at BBC 2 closedowns? A bit of music and a selection of stills from the library? I remember seeing a very swish one set to Nanci Griffith's song "From A Distance", and when David Allan was on there was often a new bit of country music.

I missed the updated Christmas guides on Sunday, but last Thursday's guides stated that BBC2 would be showing The Learning Zone most nights. I think this has got to be a mistake as The Learning Zone usually always finishes for 3 weeks over Christmas & New Year weeks and the first week into the new year itself.
I am also surprised that in the early guides that Breakfast is still planned for BBC1's morning schedule. It would be a risky and a very experimental move if this schedule is correct.