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Yes, the garish 80s daytime slide isn't ideal but that's the only thing they'd have that wasn't the camera.

I love he way that one of the lights is obviously near the door so whenever a guest comes in Nick is in a massive shadow

I've seen some of the broom cupboard clips before but normally Nick Witchell just reading stuff out, not the phone calls and VT.
The mind does boggle when you think about it - in the middle of trying to put network BBC1 out, and after a huge storm with all sorts of problems, BBC1 presentation were also putting a makeshift news bulletin out themselves too!

Now that TV Ark is back, here's Spotlight's Donald Heighway's opt out just before 7am with the local weather, linking to Nick Witchell in the Broomcupboard. Note the lack of sound after handing back to network - it's not clear whether that was finger trouble from Donald or in London.

https://www.tvark.org/?page=media&mediaid=77376

Buster's comment on the odd framing got me thinking - could the BBC1 announcer have been in position, out of shot, pressing buttons? Normally at that time the main NC1 gallery was out of circuit and the announcer handled everything from Con, those being very simple junctions.

Possibly, though if they are they're crouched down, there doesn't look like much room for a chair next to Nicholas. It's not just differently framed it looks to me like it's in a different place too, further to the right than for children's BBC

Just because the announcer usually handled the network by themselves doesn't mean they'd have to have been doing it that morning, assuming of course they could get people in who could operate the main mixer. There would have had to have been someone in Pres A of course, it wouldn't have been just Nick and an announcer.

The caption on the TV-Ark clip is a match for the one on BBC2 - just different colour and a with a pointer to BBC1. Possibly in very different colours to help identifying which was which when getting it all back on air

It's certainly much further to the right for no other apparent reason...

I wonder if any of that BBC Great Storm stuff from the broomcupboard and Pres A exists in the archives? I guess it's likely with all the chaos that was going off, nobody thought of (or was able to) pop a tape in to record it all.

I’m guessing that although some staff may not have been able to get in, many would have been able, so in theory a decent number of Breakfast Time’s gallery staff would have been there and may have been able to run the NC1 gallery to some degree. We’d have to see the very start without the Spotlight regional bit to see if an announcer introduced the programme or if Nicholas just popped up unannounced.

Was it standard to have a regional opt just prior to Breakfast Time beginning at 7? Or did Plymouth just decide to popup as they could say what was going on? (although the presenter is aware he is handing straight over to a bulletin).

Yeeess, delighted to see this again, I remember watching this years ago and was fascinated by it as the first ever bit I'd seen of that mythical morning. In Granadaland we were totally oblivious to the whole thing and I didn't watch breakfast telly in those days (I don't know why, I watched it non-stop the rest of the time) so the first I knew of it was when I got to school and everyone was talking about it. I knew nothing about Broom Cupboard Breakfast Time for ages - possibly not until the interview with Nicholas Witchell promoting Breakfast News in the Radio Times in 1989 when he mentioned it - and it became a bit of a holy grail for me, but I assumed I'd never see any of it because it would never have been recorded. Turns out I've now seen pretty much all of it!

You'd have to say that cutting in to Nick in the Broom Cupboard without sound, and then the first thing you hear is "...communications lines have been cut", it makes it sound even more unsettling and terrifying.



Yes, as confirmed here by Sir Neil Miles...



Great to see the Ceefax Pink Panther in that clip, such vivid memories of that. As you can see, the usual sequence would be the BBC1 announcer introducing the weather, followed by the regional weather (seemingly in voice only) and then the announcer would introduce Breakfast Time. Such a lot of clutter in the mornings in those days.

When Breakfast Time first moved to 7am in 1986, for a few months there was the news at 6.30 read by one of the Breakfast Time presenters, but they seem to have abandoned that idea quite early on.

I never saw any of it at the time for a different reason - we had no power for 7 days following the storm. One of my abiding memories of the week after the storm is eating my tea by candlelight, listening to the Janice Long show on my portable radio.

Thanks, so they bulked that brief forecast up with a bit of local COW and in-vision, interesting.

Looking through the TV Ark clips I see at the end of Breakfast Time in 1989 they were handing over for "the news" to someone sat in the Nine O'Clock News/daytime newsroom set which I was surprised at as they aren't doing it in the video above when they're still at Lime Grove. Was that something put in as part of the merger between news and current affairs?