The OB failed because the SHF dish at STV got misaligned by the wind, so if there was a music circuit available from the start surely they would have taken the programme in sound only from the beginning rather than making Tony go through that?
I was going to comment on here about the short time for line-up, but it appears that bluecortina has covered most of it already. A current colleague worked at LWT MCR once upon a time, and has regaled me with many stories of having about 10 seconds between the BT switch happening and the network programme being on air - and how you could find out very quickly which source you were looking at by way of a unique combination of tones known as "duotone". I just Googled it to find out a little more, and found this DS post which looks like it may have been by bluecortina in a past life
The thought of having that little time for line-up gives me palpitations!
ditto! The same chap also told me that HTV had turned down the luminance on these bars to prevent burn-in on their monitors. He didn't know this, so adjusted the luminance at his end accordingly, and when the programme started, it was far too sat-up, so he had to leap back on the equaliser and turn it all back again.
Sounds incredibly poor practice at HTV, the IBA would have done their nut !
The OB failed because the SHF dish at STV got misaligned by the wind, so if there was a music circuit available from the start surely they would have taken the programme in sound only from the beginning rather than making Tony go through that?
Yes, good point. Mind you stick a hybrid matching unit at
both
ends of a standard phone line, can result in very good audio. It's the telephones themselves that often limit most of quality.
The thought of having that little time for line-up gives me palpitations!
ditto! The same chap also told me that HTV had turned down the luminance on these bars to prevent burn-in on their monitors. He didn't know this, so adjusted the luminance at his end accordingly, and when the programme started, it was far too sat-up, so he had to leap back on the equaliser and turn it all back again.
Sounds incredibly poor practice at HTV, the IBA would have done their nut !
I remember reading about something similar at ATV in the 60s. The tx controllers at Foley Street noticed a young couple in a flat opposite had their channel on, so cranked the video level up to make the room brighter so they could see better what they were doing
........ The tx controllers at Foley Street noticed a young couple in a flat opposite had their channel on, so cranked the video level up to make the room brighter so they could see better what they were doing
Lovely story, but?
If a TV network did that, surely there's an implication for national power consumption - albeit marginally.
........ The tx controllers at Foley Street noticed a young couple in a flat opposite had their channel on, so cranked the video level up to make the room brighter so they could see better what they were doing
Lovely story, but?
If a TV network did that, surely there's an implication for national power consumption - albeit marginally.
In the 50s and 60s very few domestic TV sets had black level clamp, and of course the peak video level would have been clipped at 700mV before hitting the transmitter. The combined result would have been little to no increase in the overall brightness of the picture. It's a nice story all the same
The OB failed because the SHF dish at STV got misaligned by the wind, so if there was a music circuit available from the start surely they would have taken the programme in sound only from the beginning rather than making Tony go through that?
Steve, you're applying 50/50 hindsight in a 2016 world to a situation. The Transmission Controller, Jack McKinley-Brown, was not expecting any problems. The OB would have lined up with CCR (not Pres) and then CCR would have given Pres a source to switch to. The wind got worse as the evening drew on and the dish probably only turned so far off beam as to lose any pictures about two minutes before the broadcast, at which point CCR (can't remember who was on but they're probably still around) may have panicked, yelled to pres and dirtied the network feed. Pres realised that they hadn't got a proper standby (they ought to have, of course, but it was Christmas and I suspect nobody in the office had bothered to think about the suitability of the contents of the standby cupboard) and that the lovely wobbly crash caption was the bog standard one with the STV logo and a generic graphic. The turntable ought to have been available but Terry Cardwell (the A.T.C.) discovered the stylus was knackered and probably trusted to luck that he wouldn't need it that night. There was no such thing as a standby music cart. The studio in-vision phone (by which MCR could communicate with an in-vision announcer) didn't work but as it was used so very rarely nobody knows how long it had been broken. The audio was - I was told later - always there, but as it had been 'married' to a vision circuit in CCR nobody thought about a divorce until halfway through the non-programme. And the mixer couldn't accept just an audio line so it had to be married to some spurious vision source before the audio-only part could be switched in. And anyway they weren't showing any commercials during the service (IBA wouldn't allow it) so no revenue would be lost..... Life was a great deal more casual in those days.....
In this clip from 1988, you'll see at 1:15, the ending of ITV Schools on 4 for the day. Then, as it's not quite midday, a holding menu come up with music. On it, part way through, come up cue dots. But, this was on 4, so it would've been networked. What would the purpose of the dots be in this case, unless it was for the nations, who may have opted out of the last programme of the day to show their own one, and were waiting on the national continuity to return?
In the ITV Schools on 4 era, there were no ad breaks immediately after the end of schools programmes for the day. Normally, once the ITV logos glided on for the 10 second outro, it faded to black, then the Channel 4 logo exploded onto screen.
Steve in Pudsey suggests they may have been for S4C. Now they, like Scotland an Northern Ireland, may have been showing a local schools programme in the slot before midday. However, the staff in the control rooms in Glasgow, Belfast, or Cardiff, would surely have also seen the output coming from London, and the procedure was, certainly in Scotland, that if the last programme finished early, and the national continuity had not returned yet, they would have the rotomotion device on screen until it was ready to return to national continuity. If it was the holding slide, as you saw in the clip, surely the nations, except S4C, would've went and shown that, possibly crashing into it.
Makes the cue dots appearance puzzling, though, as Inspector Sands says, possibly just an error.
Actually, it seems that an ad-break was inserted after schools programmes on this occasion. Here is a C4 startup from the same week (after schools previews) and at the very beginning you can see the end of an ad.
That particular week C4 were showing previews of upcoming schools programmes (previously billed as Out of School, The Terms Ahead, etc) so for some reason didn't follow the usual term-time procedure before noon.
I assume an ad-break followed that menu caption (maybe a 'Sesame Street follows shortly caption on the clean feed). The nations were possibly showing a slightly longer programme before noon, hence the menu slide was used to bridge the gap (that is speculation of course - someone, possibly Ben R, may have access to the schedule).
But in short, the cue-dot is being used to signal an ad-break.
