TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

Dave seems to be having one right now.

I bet someone's moved that fan.

It's just cleared - but was okay on satellite. It may have been a local transmitter fault - but none of the other channels on the MUX were affected.

The DOGs okay - but the picture is a little off...

I saw it too on Freeview.

When the colourbars test signal was up with the LWT logo on, I was wondering just what the KRS meant? I'm sure it couldn't have been Kirkstall Road, but could it have been possible that Yorkshires control room was able to receive a test signal from LWT, and I guess Thames, so that if something being networked was lost, they could revert to a back up signal?

KRS is Kings Reach Studios and KRS is the name of the ‘local end’ circuits to TLS (LWT). There’s some debate as to the origin of the name, but afaik the circuits were named after the local area that TLS was built on before LWT settled on the final name “London Television Centre”.

Yorkshire's circuits were/are labelled YOT, I believe.

I think it was fairly usual to have a circuit from Thames/LWT available when originating programmes locally in case there was a newsflash from ITN.

It seems here that BT managed to plug the circuit that should have gone to YTV into the transmitters in place of the feed from Kirkstall Road. Possibly lucky it was just colour bars on that circuit!

Local End circuits traditionally weren't named after the company they went to but something geographic. So LWTs circuits are called KRS for Kings Reach Studios.... Kings Reach being that bit of the river. The tower nearby which was the former home of IPC magazines is King's Reach Tower.

TVam is a good example of why this practice was done, their circuits were called HOG for Henleys Old Garage. When MTV took over the building the circuit names remained, and if Viacom still have some now they are still HOG.

Thames had EUS for Euston and TFS for Teddington Film Studio.


The BBC's circuits to BH have traditionally been BBP, the P is for Portland Place (not sure what the BB is, probably as in BBC). Similarly ATV/Central's studios were BAT - B irmingham AT V*

These days some company names are used, IMGs are called IMG for example and BT's TV facilities are circuits called BT.The Hospital Club is HOSP, which is both geographic and the name of the company

*EDIT or was it Birmingham Alpha Tower?

That's not the sort of fault that would be the result of the transmission or distribution. Once it's encoded into MPEG for transmission it would be blocky rather than liney. That's more a fault in the uncompressed SDI domain as is a loss of sync

It's like The ITV Chart Show :-p

Back from the early days of Channel 4, though given at the time, 1983, the local ITV contractors were responsible for selling the airtime on Channel 4, this breakdown would appear to be TVS's fault, given the advert for the new homes.

It's also worth mentioning the theory that someone says, Channel 4 switched the advertising feed to Granada. I doubt that happened. I think what happened was, the Croft sherry advert was the last advert in this break, and obviously TVS couldn't get it set up. As mentioned in the comments, the Granada name on the print countdown only refers to either the distributor, or the production company for the advert, and not for who was broadcasting it.

Yes, Channel 4 wouldn't have even known there was a problem, the adverts are being put in way downstream of them and there wouldn't be an off air feed of every region at C4.

Also they wouldn't care, its TVS's airtime to fill so if there's a problem then it's their problem, not C4's


It's odd how the Croft advert had a countdown, I thought when ad breaks were run from film they were spliced together into one 3 minute film, not run as seperate reels