Things you don't hear or see on TV anymore

The death of Princess Diana caused a lot of channels to put up "turn to Sky/BBC/somebody News for an update" type captions which is probably the modern equivalent of that, albeit signposting viewers elsewhere for the details.

Yep, as I said, a 'royal death'

Straps pointing to news reports on another channel have gone out a few times over recent years. Not just for a royal obit by any means, but when that happens you'll see it across many more channels because many of those without their own news output will also put up a generic "turn to a news channel" (or to the BBC, in UKTV's case). But quite often, if news has been deemed important enough to interrupt schedules (e.g. Nelson Mandela, Paris attacks), there'll be straps on the broadcaster's other channels pointing viewers to the news report.

As mentioned, one thing that has changed is that you won't usually get details of the news itself on the caption these days, but the above example isn't the only time. Think I remember by-election results being flashed up on screen as late as the 90s. And I'm fairly sure the well-known ITN blue strap was used to put up news updates during programmes a few times?

I remember back in the late 90s itv would put up a strap, I think ITN branded, with the lottery numbers. Wonder how that got to air?

ITV did it so that they didn't lose viewers to the lottery show on BBC1, I remember it being promoted by continuity that the numbers would be shown during whatever show was on at the time. Presumably ITV asked ITN to provide the numbers and make the strap.

These were the early days of the lottery when millions would tune in just for the numbers.

I presume ITN fed the strap out on the 'news standby' feed, and whoever the ITV company was that was playing out to network the programme it was inserted over, simply keyed the strap onto the 'Tx to Network' output ?

How would you key without the key though?

Which given it was a saturday night would almost always have been LWT, anyway?

If ITN were feeding the strap against a green background could whichever company was originating the programme have keyed that over their output or would there have been too many artefacts etc?

With the PAL composite circuits at the time (20 yrs ago), that wouldn't have looked too good. ISTR it was never a very strident superimpostion, but you don't need a key signal to key, you can create a mask from the signal you wish to key, even 20 yrs ago ?

If it didn't have semi-transparency or any black content, then a straight luminance self-key?

Although it tended to be during Family Fortunes from what I recall, which was a Central show.