Next door to that building was a facilities company called Footprint TV, I installed an edit suite in there in 1991, perhaps they were comsumed by Macmillan?
The buildings look different, but I do remember the pub opposite!
Thanks to the uploader of that video for adding their own subtitles, including "(SIGHS AND COUGHS)"
How did the regional opting for GMTV work? Obviously the breakfast slot wasn't the franchisee's purview, so I assume their own playout suite wasn't in line at the time. Did LNN do the lot?
GMTV was looped through most of the regional ITV companies, so they could opt for local news. All except Granada and UTV (two other non ITV companies did those regions I think? ). It all came out of LNN but LNN inserted (from the South Bank), macro regional ads
Each site had a black box that would switch between the incoming GMTV feed and the local news studio. The remote boxes were controlled by a panel in front of the GMTV director. Whether the black box could be overridden locally I do not know, but as I worked with the chap who designed and built them I can ask in a few weeks time. GMTV also distributed their gallery talkback (encoded in teletext) for national distribution, no doubt this helped.
I must have missed something here, why would the Grampian feed be anywhere near Norwich?
Why would it even be fed down to London?
If as suggested there is the remote box at Anglia, surely it cannot be that being fed by the Aberdeen studio.
So the feed must have been interupted elsewhere - most probably at a BT site between London and Norwich?
Next door to that building was a facilities company called Footprint TV, I installed an edit suite in there in 1991, perhaps they were comsumed by Macmillan?
The buildings look different, but I do remember the pub opposite!
Before then (was it Reuters who provided the NI News until around 2000?) it was based in the awful pile of concrete vomit that was Fanum House. Both buildings had line of sight to Havelock House.
It has to be a BT routing error, putting the Grampian feed into Norwich's black box as the network feed? That would have to be the result of a catalogue of screw ups though, surely.
Next door to that building was a facilities company called Footprint TV, I installed an edit suite in there in 1991, perhaps they were comsumed by Macmillan?
The buildings look different, but I do remember the pub opposite!
Before then (was it Reuters who provided the NI News until around 2000?) it was based in the awful pile of concrete vomit that was Fanum House. Both buildings had line of sight to Havelock House.
Sky were also based in there for a good while.
The AA's offices around the country were all named Fanum House. I wonder if the previous tenants meant it had better than average connectivity?
Belfast's Fanum House has been mooted for a hotel development for at least 10 years now.
Cardiff's equally ugly Fanum House was converted into trendy apartments at the turn of the century, notable for a catastrophic scaffolding collapse during redevelopment.
I must have missed something here, why would the Grampian feed be anywhere near Norwich?
Why would it even be fed down to London?
If as suggested there is the remote box at Anglia, surely it cannot be that being fed by the Aberdeen studio.
So the feed must have been interupted elsewhere - most probably at a BT site between London and Norwich?
My guess is a feed from Grampian had been booked by GMTV for a DTL interview during the show, and BT got their wires crossed (literally) and it ended up replacing the feed to Norwich (and possibly other regions too)
It's worth mentioning at the time the video is from I believe Anglia was transmitted alongside Meridian from Southampton, not Norwich. So potentially Meridian also saw a glimpse Grampian if they were taking the same network feed. This would explain Stephen's reaction, clearly the team in Norwich knew what was going out but couldn't do anything about it until the automation put them live at the normal time.
The appearance of LNN's Digital Transmission Centre test card during GMTV's headlines makes me wonder if the switching error occured at LNN's end rather than at BT's end, unless Grampian's gallery also had a separate feed from LNN going up to them? Either way, they were definitely getting a feed from Grampian's gallery rather than the expected network feed.
It's worth mentioning at the time the video is from I believe Anglia was transmitted alongside Meridian from Southampton, not Norwich. So potentially Meridian also saw a glimpse Grampian if they were taking the same network feed. This would explain Stephen's reaction, clearly the team in Norwich knew what was going out but couldn't do anything about it until the automation put them live at the normal time.
The appearance of LNN's Digital Transmission Centre test card during GMTV's headlines makes me wonder if the switching error occured at LNN's end rather than at BT's end, unless Grampian's gallery also had a separate feed from LNN going up to them? Either way, they were definitely getting a feed from Grampian's gallery rather than the expected network feed.
Yes, very good points. It was at a time when ITV's playout was starting to get consolidated and centalised, so yes, could well have been an LNN error, and could well have affected Meridian and HTV West too!
Wasn't the big issue with UTV that they forcibly opted out of GMTV to cover the Good Friday agreement signing - so whatever system they had at that point could be manually overridden against GMTV's wishes.
