Repost from the YouTube Gold thread (originally posted by ToasterMan) as this is a corker of a breakdown. A broken telecine gate causes Andy Crane to have to fill for about 3 and a half minutes.
Last edited by Inspector Sands on 8 September 2020 9:58am
That is great, remember much discussion about this at the time as one of the all-time great CBBC breakdowns. When he was interviewed for my old stomping ground of Offthetelly a while ago now, he was asked about this. He said that later in his CBBC career it would have been easy to fill a gap that long because they were getting so many letters, he would have a huge box of standby material, and he said that towards the end of his time they could have done the whole afternoon without any programmes. But this was very early in his full-time stint, presumably only about two or three weeks in, so he didn't have loads of letters, hence the rather frantic filling.
Convenient they had the Top 10, a regular CBBC feature on a Tuesday afternoon in those days as of course it had been announced at lunchtime so this was the first most kids heard of it. Was only a few weeks of that left before it was announced on a Sunday.
It's that "frantic filling" that I give him credit for. I much prefer it when presenters and CAs hold their hands up and are honest about what's going on, rather than the sheepish and redundant attempt to save face and pretend things aren't all that bad.
The sad thing is, what with that having happened 33 years ago to the day, I think I remember watching that go out live. (I certainly remember a breakdown where they did the chart early to fill time)
Is Andy loading an audio cart into the machine just as Popeye falls off air? I thought music in a breakdown came from the grams, there's certainly a record on there.
Is Andy loading an audio cart into the machine just as Popeye falls off air? I thought music in a breakdown came from the grams, there's certainly a record on there.
No, looks like he's pushing up a fader or similar. Possibly setting up the wipe for the widescreen effect? The button he uses to put it on and take it off is on the same part of the desk.
It's surprising that it took them so long to ditch out our the programme, I wonder if they cut back to Andy when the film stopped, or the film was stopped when they thought they'd already cut away from it
Is Andy loading an audio cart into the machine just as Popeye falls off air? I thought music in a breakdown came from the grams, there's certainly a record on there.
No, looks like he's pushing up a fader or similar. Possibly setting up the wipe for the widescreen effect? The button he uses to put it on and take it off is on the same part of the desk.
It's surprising that it took them so long to ditch out our the programme, I wonder if they cut back to Andy when the film stopped, or the film was stopped when they thought they'd already cut away from it
I know nothing about telecines. What was the fault, it looked to me like a scanning problem as the image was getting squashed, rather than cropped?
No, looks like he's pushing up a fader or similar. Possibly setting up the wipe for the widescreen effect? The button he uses to put it on and take it off is on the same part of the desk.
His right hand is going for the mic fader (on the far right of the desk), and I think finding it already open. But watch his left hand, it's certainly near the cart machine and doing something that sounds like putting a cart in.
Is Andy loading an audio cart into the machine just as Popeye falls off air? I thought music in a breakdown came from the grams, there's certainly a record on there.
No, looks like he's pushing up a fader or similar. Possibly setting up the wipe for the widescreen effect? The button he uses to put it on and take it off is on the same part of the desk.
It's surprising that it took them so long to ditch out our the programme, I wonder if they cut back to Andy when the film stopped, or the film was stopped when they thought they'd already cut away from it
I know nothing about telecines. What was the fault, it looked to me like a scanning problem as the image was getting squashed, rather than cropped?
It looks like a ‘classic’ faulty scanning crt raster on a twin lens telecine. In layman’s terms the taller the scanning raster is, the more squashed the resultant picture (very much layman’s terms!). So, it looks like a fault with the vertical height of the scanning crt raster - you’re not going to fix it there and then unless you’re extremely lucky and transferring it to another machine is the only real option.
Is Andy loading an audio cart into the machine just as Popeye falls off air? I thought music in a breakdown came from the grams, there's certainly a record on there.
I always thought the gram player was for the pre-planned breaks (under running, menus, the schools 'buffer zone' programmes when with one tv in a school, one class was herded out before another hurded in to the tv room) and for an extended breakdown.
Things like that.
A cart player would be more useful, and a lot quicker getting music on air in a breakdown situation than a record. Carts removes the continuity announcer having to pull a LP from the record bag, and dump the stylus on the record at the right location, with his/her back turned from the monitor stack.
Carts being closer, and with output being visable, whether to press play on the cart machine, or if pictures are back, not.
This is a classic from 2018 caused by bad weather in London. I even remember hearing that some regions handled the signal loss differently. Such as here in Meridian region we had the black screen and still blocky picture but we did not have the colour bars or “Signal Loss Detected” we just cut from frozen image straight to breakdown slide.