Fire alarm at News at ten!

Off topic, I know - but “voiceover” seems to be replacing “announcer” as Joe Public’s word to describe the CA. My local Heart station recently had a lengthy discussion (including listeners texts) about a mistake an ITV announcer made and not once was she referred to as the announcer - always “the voiceover person” or similar.

I would have expected that there would be a visual alert in the studio and gallery of an alarm in the building which assuming the alert is in another zone should be treated as be prepared to leave and then once the alarm is going off audibly in the studio and gallery they should be leaving immediately and at that point telling viewers what is happening should not be the priority. Staff safety first. I wonder how this is trained to staff as clearly media organisations aren't likely to run fire drill practices that result in taking programmes off air.

I don't know if I'd call it a complex algorithm - one trigger (eg a call point or smoke detector) triggers a warning, two triggers an evacuation. Some triggers (smoke detector in an apparatus room) could trigger fire suppression systems and an immediate evacuation.

I believe most studios just have visual alerts and may be behind the scenes.

I think most large buildings will wait nowadays to verify the alarm - for safety purposes. Evacuating several hundred to thousands of people can be dangerous in their own right. I believe there was some talk after the Grenfell fire that standard operating procedure is that the floor & wing where there’s a fire or alarm going off and the floors above / below are to be evacuated while the rest of the floors should be prepared to evacuate. Granite the Grenfell Fire was a horrendous disaster that had extenuating circumstances.

See also when the One Show had to evacuate and the CA (when pres finally woke up) kept going on about a "fault".

Well, way back in the analogue days, Hannington (Sou/TVS/Mer 'West' region) was the emergency standby off air feed for ITV Crystal Palace, so perhaps that legacy lives on ?

It's not about what students are taught, it's the way the online 'news' industry works these days. Journalists on news sites are expected to come up with a certain number of stories a day. They don't have time to go out into the field, find and research and come up with stories, they're desk bound looking through social media coming up with their 10 articles of clickbait.


Journalism courses teach them the proper skills, but then they get a job at Mail Online for a pittance and find there's no time to use them

They probably do for the right circumstances.


This wasn't really the right time for a standby filler. Firstly as you say, what's appropriate? Secondly it's a fluid situation, as far as the TC or anyone at ITN knows they could come back into the studio at any moment and pick up where they left off.


Thirdly there's a live opt out programme next, crews waiting all over the country ready to go. Do they want to give them even more uncertainty? Plus I don't know how their playout works but would they risk buggering up that opt event by hastily copy and pasting a programme into the schedule at the last minute.


I wonder what's more likely to hold someone's attention and keep them tuned in to ITV?
A breakdown slide that acknowledges that there's a problem and normal service will resume, or some odd filler that makes it look like they've given up on news for the night?

He says, using the term CA....

Being a radio presenter, they're usually more aware of the job of a voice over than a continuity announcer. These days the job is more like a voice over gig on most channel. They just go somewhere or dial in their isdn and record a load at one go, they might not even go anywhere near a playout suite

CA has been used as an abbreviation here since the very beginning - 'continuity announcer' is quite long winded so I would have thought it's alright to shorten it like Good Morning Britain is GMB.

It was apparently used in at least one ITV region: https://tvforum.uk/forums/post772619#post-772619

Fire alarm going off at Milbank just there on Sky News. I seem to remember Adam Boulton saying this is a weekly event at 10.15 although you'd think they'd change it to a time when they aren't broadcasting as it can be rather off putting.

I think I preferred the breakdown music from this era...