TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

Those BBC Knowledge shows trailed look more suited to the early highbrow BBC Four. I guess it had already become a proto BBC Four by that point anyway.

That static ident seems like it was some sort of default they could bring up - it looks like the same one from the pre-URL days in this clip that was on TV Home. Wonder why a normal ident couldn't be played that night?

Yes, I seem to remember they had stills handy in the stills store along with breakdown slides etc. So maybe in that breakdown the director went for a stills store output and picked one with an ident still rather than a breakdown slide loaded on it.


Of course one use for these was for obits as seen when the Queen Mum died

That makes more sense.

VH1 Xmas was using the MTV Rocks DOG with the Xmas graphics, has now been fixed.

It would appear not...

Same on MTV XMAS which is showing the MTV Classic DOG at the moment.

It probably relates to the red ribbon for World AIDS Day which is under the DOGs for all the channels today

Perhaps they are the default DOGs for use with the ribbon so the system just defaults to the DOG regardless of what the channel is doing?

This has been posted in this thread before it seems, and probably numerous times elsewhere on this forum, but I don't think I've actually seen it until now. It's probably the most dramatic breakdown I've seen yet. The picture and sound on a film cuts suddenly to black, then fifteen seconds later there's a brief burst of static to scare the living **** out of you - what happened there?

My first thought was that the actual transmitter had broken down, but I don't think that would be the case with the interruption being so short. When the announcer first comes back, his voice is distorted, so it must have been quite a major breakdown rather than it being something like forgetting to change the film reel.

This may have been posted before, in the 95 pages of this thread. The "Richard Littlejohn Live & Uncut" clip from LWT, where some unsuitable content (!) is switched to air - not knowing whether LWT's Pres Desk was mostly hard-wired sources, or whether VTs and studios were assigned to the desk as Outside Sources, I don't know quite how this would have happened.

The Announcer, Peter Lewis according to the comments, sounds as shocked as the viewer would have been.

I first saw this on the 10th Birthday 'Worst Cockups' LNN party tape, which has long-since been taken down from YouTube. There were some crackers on that.

It's on YouTube, and is NOT SAFE FOR WORK - put "TV Takeover Sex clip on Live ITV Night time show" into a search on YouTube and it should be there. Not posting a link to it.

Certainly a strange one. The fact that it took so long to back to the breakdown slide when they rejoined the film the first time without sound is intriguing, plus that the sound still wasn't there for 10 seconds or so when they went back a second time.

1997 was the era of separate analogue and digital pres suites, but all of the scenarios I can think of seem a bit far fetched.

Could it have been an electrical fault, that then caused something in the Pres suite on BBC1 to trip? Certainly, when we hear Andy Taylor the first time, it sounds like static electricity is causing the sound distortion.