TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

I used to have a Freeview box that if you left it on CBeebies after it closed down at 7pm you would be able to hear BBC Four behind the off-air caption (and the same for CBBC and BBC Three) but of course that was back in the days when they literally shared the same video outputs.

Then when I first had a satellite receiver (it wasn't Freesat, it was just one of these where you hooked it up to a dish, it did a scan and picked up thousands of channels including every regional variation from every channel going - never saw so many C4+1s in my life!), when CBBC/CBeebies closed you could see it fade to black and then come back up 40 seconds later with the "BBC Three gets going shortly" slide.

The original proposals for BBC 4 was that it was to provide young children's programming during the day, so the splitting of output and making them seem like different channels came later.

(I believe the arrangement for CBBC on Freeview in Scotland is even more complicated)

Yes the flash of breakdown slide at 7pm, is a deliberate warning to parents that I does exist and to imagine what hell would break loose if it was ever needed

Or maybe it's just a quirk of timing...
As we all know Cbeebies shares bandwidth to the viewers with BBC4. At just before 7 there's some switching that reconfigures the distribution so that the channel numbers for Cbeebies switch to a caption generated from your box. At the same time the opposite happens on the channel numbers for BBC Four. The same thing happens sometime in the early morning, (5:30ish?) but in reverse

However it always used to be that both BBC4 and Cbeebies were they same output from playout, they just faded to black for a few minutes to do the above. Now however, my understanding is that for some reason they're seperate outputs and when they're not on air they show a breakdown slide.

I suspect that the brief flash of the Cbeebies slide is because the 1st switch on our boxes is happening a fraction of a second too late for the 2nd switch. Its probably dependent on receiver and platform if you see it or not. We get it on Freeview but only for a fraction of a second, literally blink and you miss it

Sometimes if you watch BBC Four live on iplayer, you get the Cbeebies Breakdown slide if the "BBC Four returns at 19:00" disappears too early.

Surely that would mean they kept the same output for that to happen?

And sometimes the CBBC DOG would stay on screen for a few minutes, or in some cases well into the first programme, when BBC Three took over.

And on at least one occasion, well into the evening...

Now to a breakdown that happened on GMTV in 2000 where Grampian TV decided to show up on Anglia before GMTV handed over to the local news.