Carlton Central Off Air

About 5 minutes into Coronation Street, the picture went for a second then came back on again and now Teletext p600 from Carlton works after a few hours of not working. Unfortunately, I think Carlton have regained total control of the Midlands, yet again pumping their rubbish out. Pity!

They probably can't afford the loss of ad revenue from the commercials shown during Corrie!

Apologise for the double post - the server threw up a CGI timeout.

(Edited by Andrew Wood at 10:19 pm on July 29, 2001)

Carlton Central is back

Carlton Central's back on air now. There was a voiceover:

'We apologise for the disruption to your viewing tonight, this was due to technical problems, which have now been sorted out' .

A silent ident was running in the background.

Oh well, another dream has come to the end. 'The day we got rid of Carlton', all thanks to the Midlands Electricity Board!

Apparantly, HTV has problems as well, the Carlton Switching Area was affected and HTV could'nt broadcast some of their programmes (which probably says something about HTV's continuity no longer in Wales...?)

D'oh! So my corrie watching WAS a waste of time then!! Oh well!
LWT idents back as normal.

EDIT: Ignore this one! CGI error!

(Edited by BBC Choice at 8:11 pm on July 29, 2001)

Don't you just like these TV Home Live events!.

I wasn't even in the effected regions and still knew exactly what was going on!

Yep! If I was still at home in the UK, my main ITV region would be (I'm tempted to say ATV ! ) Carlton Central!

Just a point to note: the main broadcast centre for Central is in Birmingham - i.e all presentation is dealt there - Nottingham holds the studios for all Carlton Central Productions and do not deal with the broadcasts - so a prob at Brum i guess.

Just to answer Asa's question, the idents were the overnight ones, probably to draw as little attention to the problem as possible (neither LWT nor Central use the ITV generic music).

I suppose we are still none the wiser what the actual error was, but it did provide a bit of excitement for three hours!!

I expect Central will now have to pay their advertisers for not showing their adverts, and LWT's advertisers have had rather more coverage than what they were expecting!