BBC News at 10 / News Channel - Technical problems 20/06/17

The whole bulletin was run entirely manually in the end, with locked-off cameras, a vision mixer, and VT's played in live from edit suites. This was possible because the nationals are up-staffed as compared to regular Channel output; indeed if this had happened at a different time you would likely have seen a recorded bulletin from the previous hour.

Cutting NCH distribution away from gallery output via switching panel or X-Y is possible, and indeed will be done in certain circumstances by various people outside the gallery. In this case it would have caused more problems than it solved - particularly given that the Gallery team had a contingency ready to go in a matter of minutes.
Make no mistake, this was a pretty major systems failure and the gallery staff did well to get back on their feet as quickly as they did. One of those incidents where you're glad it's your day off!

Last night's 10pm breakdown, from just before the problems occurred, and into the breakdown:

BBC1 Network:



BBC1 Northern Ireland:



Notice NI's breakdown soundtrack is directly related to the BBC1 generic sting's soundtrack.

The media reaction is quite astonishing. It's almost as if television has broke for the first time.

How come NC stayed on air? They've been able to bring up a breakdown slide in the past when things go belly up, and this was at an important time of evening.

If there's one thing the media love to talk about, it's the media.



There's the exploration of that question in the related Newsroom thread

I'm glad this eventually got it's own thread.

Huw Edwards may have had a rough night at the office but he's not the only BBC newsreader to fall foul of a 'technical problem' or two! pic.twitter.com/Dv0cLaEfV1

— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) June 21, 2017

It was a MAJOR MELTDOWN according to one tabloid, I'll let you guess which.

What's caused the fuss is Huw's four minutes worth twiddling his thumbs, you don't often see that. If there'd been holding slides as per BBC 1,not a single word would have been printed.

But hey, all publicity is good publicity, as long as they spell your name right

It was a bit like Time Trumpet's 'No News' prophecy had come true.

Given the news of late replacing the Ten with half an hour of Huw sat in silence isn't such a bad idea.

I just want the hydraulic desk bit and I don't mind if WW3 breaks out.

Context:

Interesting to see some of BBC's outputs of last night's breakdown simultaneously, and how they differed in the handling of this situation.

Video here: