Tommy Cooper's jokes in his last perfomance

There was no way that anyone could have known what would happen. Yes Tommy Cooper's death in itself was a tragic event and the fact that it happened live in front of millions of people watching (myself included) just enhanced it.

The fact is that no-one knows how live coverage of any event will turn out, yes there can be preperations and back up plans but there is always the risk of something serious happening. Cooper and Senna are two examples as was the Hillsborough tragedy (although I don't remember if it was shown live on the BBC).

There is an inherent uncertainty over live events and nothing is foolproof.

Hillsborough was shown live to an extent. The FA would not allow Cup Semi Finals to be shown live, although one match from each earlier round was, and the rearranged Semi Final was, as were all subsequent one.

Once the match had been stopped and the awful situation became clearer the BBC began to show live pictures but made sure they didn’t show those in the greatest destress in close ups, so families watching wouldn’t have the added destress of seeing the most severely injured.

However the director ensured that cameras which did have close up shots were recorded and this was invaluable to close ups. I’m not sure how many it was possible to do that with - it may have been one alternate mix that was recorded, or that alternate mix was the ‘safer’ one fed live to Grandstand. John Inverdale - who was presenting ‘Sport On 2’ that day has talked about seeing images that should never be broadcast.

‘Match of the Day’ that night used some very carefully chosen pictures to tell the story of the tragedy. (Des Lyman and Jimmy Hill had been there, the originally planned opening still exists and has been shown.) Considering all the lies that were to be spread later, the programme gets most things right.

(Incidentally the coverage on ‘Sport on 2’ that day is interesting in terms of how different a unfolding tragedy would be covered now. There is no rolling coverage of the the unfolding tragedy, it is taken as regular updates whilst going back to coverage of other events. Some of it is startlingly matter of fact. However the tone is very well judged and once it gets to ‘Sports Report’ - the only time until that time the theme hadn’t been used - you get Peter Jones’ immensely powerful summing up “and the sun shines now.”)

With Imola in 1994 the BBC were fortunate for a couple of reasons. They hadn’t been broadcasting qualifying live when Roland Ratzenberger died. They had seen how RAI had shown graphic close ups of resuscitation efforts going on. (There is a brief shot of them in ‘Senna’ along with Senna’s reaction.) Steve Rider has said that after seeing these they discussed what they would do if something tragic were to happen during the race.

Fortunately that was one of the first races they’d sent Steve Rider and a BBC camera too. When Senna has his accident they were prepared. As the RAI pictures from the helicopter became more graphic they were able to cut to their own camera roaming the pit lane.

This seems to be a theme of Italian television - when an marshal was hit by a flying tire at the Italian Grand Prix in 2000, RAI once again went in for close ups from the helicopter that clearly showed the resuscitation attempts that were underway. I can remember being pretty shocked they were showing that. I’m not sure why ITV didn’t cut away - it may have been FOM had tightened up the rules by then about how much anyone could cut away (ad breaks excepted).

The contrast was when Michael Schumacher had a big crash at the 1999 British Grand Prix, ITV kept the helicopter shots very wide - and I seem to remember their being a sheet or similar stopping any close ups.

I think we’ve discussed this somewhere before as a cultural difference in Italy, as when cyclist Wouter Weylandt died during the 2011 Giro d’Italia there were apparently quite graphic close ups of attempts to save him (from RAI’s host broadcast I’m guessing) shown to the world.

There's an RTE feed of the events at Hillsborough on YouTube that I'm assuming went out live. They briefly cut to a haunting shot that comments imply was a number of victims piled up. What compelled them to cut to that I'm not quite sure.

That video starts with the introduction from ‘Sports Stadium’ so it would have been live coverage using the BBC pictures. (It’s possible it was shown live elsewhere as well- maybe Scandinavia, I think they were early countries to take Saturday afternoon Football League games, so quite possible they’d take a high profile Cup Semi Final.)

I can only guess the director didn’t realise what was in the shot, or the comments aren’t correct. If they had I’m sure they wouldn’t have used it again.

I’ve not watched all that video of RTE‘s coverage (as I don’t wish to see the more graphic pictures that may be in there) but later on it does include a brief bit of John Motson shouting to the ‘Grandstand’ gallery, perhaps indicating some changing of what was being fed where as the events unfolded.

Speaking of John Motson he did spot something being amiss a short while before kick off with the side pens being very empty compared to the overcrowded middle pen. There are off air recordings of him offering to go on ‘Grandstand’ for as long as they needed / wanted him to. He does report the line from the Police about a gate being broken down, but then so does Alan Green on ‘Sport on 2’, and as a journalist you’d hope to be able to trust a police spokesperson in a situation like that. It’s noticeable that the BBC coverage doesn’t repeat that line later on, I think by ‘Match of the Day’ the fans account of what happened is included.

I would assume that RTE were taking what ever pictures the BBC were sending out from Hillsborough. Its probably the case that the UK feed were showing long shots and ground wide pans, out on the international feed they were doing the zooms and close-up (for, you would suspect for the later national news broadcasts)

Back to F1, and its thankfully one of the better aspects of FOM taking control of the world feed of races (except Monaco) in that you don't get close ups and endless replays of incidents that require 'medical extraction' of the drivers.

They will never cut to or show a replay of a crash, until team radio has heard the driver talk back to his race engineer (confirming he's not been knocked unconscious) or the driver has got out of the car either with or without the help of the marshals.

RTE often took a feed from the BBC for sporting coverage. They would have had access to the feed back at their television centre in Montrose, Dublin and it was up to the director in the gallery who decided which shots RTE viewers would see.

I’d have expected - especially in those days - that the international feed would be the same as the pictures used as the basis of the ‘Match of the Day’ highlights.

Just to clarify what I wrote, I wouldn’t have thought they’d put out graphic pictures to other countries, I suspect this shot (and any others that went out live) is either a mistake and / or occurred before they had a clear idea what was going on. I doubt on the day the more graphic pictures went outside the BBC.

Not down to the individual cameras they wouldn’t have. For an event like that they’d have got the output of the BBC ‘match cut’ truck.

A technician who worked in RTE from the late 60s until the mid 80s told me that in the 60s, 70s and 80s, RTE Television had access to the BBC and ITV feeds via the Eurovision connection, is that correct I wonder?

Also, they said they had used simple off air pictures from BBC and ITV transmissions from Northern Ireland and Wales when the Eurovision feed would not work or there was a fault.

Yes they’d have had a connection to Eurovision - a single microwave feed back then, not sure when it began to expand. So that would only carry the biggest events, along with the news feeds.

I’m sure I’ve read RTE also had their own direct line from the BBC. Which would make sense given the amount of BBC programmes they took live (or near live) and that wouldn’t have been on Eurovision. Off air rebroadcast would have, I’d think, been a last resort.

It wasn’t live - but IIRC NBC got into a lot of trouble for showing the death of a luge athlete on a run at the winter Olympics in 2010. To the credit of NBC News management, they did step in pretty quickly to stop it being shown again, but it does show the contrast between our preparedness to show such situations compared to others.

It does happen in the heat of the moment though. There was a shot that went out on the BBC on 7/7 of someone being given CPR while being pushed into an ambulance.

It went out on News 24 at least once and then got pulled. Where I worked at the time had recorded it and we had to make sure it was purged from everywhere as it was far too graphic