TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

Rubbing salt into the wounds of the Tories who've just lost their Election Broadcast by filling the screen with the colour of Labour.

In the good old days, captions that accompanied etc PPBs were either black and white, or took on the colour of the party whose broadcast it was.

It's not an unreasonable assumption to think that that should still be the case, people outside of this forum (who are usually quite happy seeing notices in the newsagents' window in Comic Sans etc) might interpret the the red of a BBC 1 caption as something beyond the channel branding ?

Assuming this is the same incident (and if a PEB failed twice at Thames I'd be surprised) it was an engineer I once worked with who was on that evening and it was his job to run the tape. I heard him interviewed a while back and he told the full story of the incident. He said it was the the night before the 1987 election, so a Wednesday, therefore it couldn't be shown next day

It being Wednesday was the reason why it went wrong - most of Thames' VT capacity was being used for Midweek Sport Special so the PEB got shoved onto a machine it wouldn't normally come from and that was connected as part of an edit setup. When they rehearsed it that afternoon it worked fine as there wasn't an edit happening


As for conspiracy theories, there were accusations that it was a leftie TV engineer who sabotaged the broadcast including in the Morning Star, but it was actually just a cock up.

Not that it hindered their results the next day

When did they stop playing out films from telecine?

Edit: spell check fail

Oh, well you might well be right. I do remember something on a Friday, because it had failed on the Thursday. Thinking again, it might have been the last 5 mins of a drama, that HTV had been networking, that had its end chopped owing to a BT switching error. I recall something like that, and the following night the missing chunk being rebroadcast around 10pm. The networked HTV CA explaining, and emphasis on it being BT's fault ! I'm sure that was Peter Lewis (who back in the 80s worked for HTV and LWT)

TK you mean ?

This came up recently elsewhere. The BBC and some ITV companies were still doing it for some films/film programmes as late as the early 90s.

C4 never transmitted directly from TK for their outset. I can't imagine Sky did either ?

I was reading a Thames engineering department newsletter from 1987 recently ( http://www.arts-tv.org.uk/memorabilia/Inside-Engineering-August-1987-web.pdf if you're as sad as me) and they had recently stopped TXing from film then.

Of course back in the day they seemingly had slides made up for every programme, most of which would never see the light of day, so that would be what would be shown rather than a generic apology slide.

I have seen quite a bit of breakdown that I have witnessed happened on tv

In 2007 Channel 5 where showing a movie when the screen froze for I think 5 minutes or more without going to a breakdown caption then after the 5 minutes the movie resumed but from the very last lines from the film. When the end credits came the Channel 5 announcer apologized for losing the film. After doing alot of reserach I can't seem to find the breakdown anywhere

In Late 2007 or Early 2008 Boomerang had a breakdown for an entire advert break I seen it happen on the +1 verison of Boomerang so it happened an hour earlier by the time I saw it. Again no online footage of it.

In Summer 2013 During an episode of wwe raw that was shown live after a seeing Mark Henry doing the World's Strongest Slam to John Cena the screen went to a testcard then a black screen with the Sky Sports 3 DOG being the only thing on the screen then it disapprears and sky cut to a testcard with the sky bassophere music in the backround but it was only a few seconds before it came back on again
I haven't seen this one online at all

On the 4th Jauary 2014 BBC one had a breakdown while showing the BDO World Championship the screen went black but the sound contiunded no alopgy was made by the commetators until the screen went to the Breakdown slide where a bbc one annoucer aplogazed to viewers and played some music but the music was short lived as the darts would come back with the announcer saying that they were pleased to return to the lakeside. I think I saw this online when a person desied to upload the match but he edited the breakdown out but you could still see it going black I can't find the youtuber who made it however so his channel must of had a copyright strike on it.

In Febuary 2015 There was an antoher breakdown on Sky Sports once again on the live of WWE RAW were the picture went red then went to a testcard and then went to the sky sports breakdown slide this time it took a couple of minutes for it to be fixed. There is a video on youtube showing the breakdown here

In spring 2017 I was flicking thourgh the channel's when on the BBC Red Button channel there was a temporary fault slide that happened during the World Championship of Snooker It only took one minute though for the proplem to be fixed. There is no sign of this online but this video is quite silmar to what happened

If I think of anymore I will tell you all

Oh, very good. There's an ex colleague of mine in one of those pictures, with plenty of hair !

Yes, although I was thinking more of the 'into/outro slides, which were unbranded, (because they were networked in the case of ITV, and appeared on BBC 1 and 2 in the case of the Beeb (when PPBs were simulcast on all three channels)).