BBC Parliament down

Not sure what has happened, it's like a live shot from late 80's

http://img828.imageshack.us/img828/9168/bbcparliament.jpg

Back at about 00:45.

What was the feed they showed when it was down? What area was it and was it live?

Well it seemed live, I seen the tube go past. Whether its pre-recorded or not I have no idea

I bet viewer's would prefer to watch that picture to what's going on in Parliament

No they wouldn't.

Notice that the ticker is slightly too far down on the picture, gets cut off slightly unless you turn overscan off.

That'll be the high-definition weather camera on the roof of TV Centre. And the latest in caption generating technology.

Sometime in the last year, BBC Parliament's playout moved from Millbank Studios to BBC Millbank. Unfortunately, being in the same building means it's still at risk from the same power problems, and the playout (especially during recess) still seems to fall over an awful lot.
There are various backup plans - N9 can sometimes step in to play out appropriate material - but more often than not there's copious amounts of bodging required to get something on the air.

(Bonus points for spotting a months out-of-date edition of The Record , followed by a 'Tevion' splashscreen because the DVD player's so cheap that it doesn't have a loop function)

I thought that was a webcam they used (bbc weather) , they used to have pics every hour on the site. This was a live cam that was on at the time.

this one? It was a framegrab of the same camera. (The camera is remote controllable, so isn't always pointing in the same direction)