Power outage at BBC Wales

Ah. I thought it was left for 1, right for 2.

I have vague memories of a version of TCF like the 91-97 BBC 1 & 2 versions, but with the OU symbol instead of the 1 or 2. Did this really exist, or am I imagining it? It must have been around 1991 if it did.

I seem to recall that too, but this one has it in both corners

After you made your original comment about the difference between the two channels, I also assumed left for BBC One, right for BBC Two. My hazy recollection was that 'OU' was top left (generally). But, my recollections may have been influenced by recordings I've seen in more recent years when going through archive recordings.

I think I vaguely recall a YT recording of a BBC One closedown, where the OU test signal appears. No idea what the clip was though. And I don't believe I have any BBC One examples in my archive.

The recording that I took that still from is a closedown with the '==2==' clock. It seems to be from the early hours of Sunday 29th July 1984, at the end of 'Ella Fitzgerald at Ronnie Scott's'. So a year earlier than I expected it to be.

I think you may be imagining it. An OU branded TCF might well have been used within one of the broadcast engineering theroy programmes though if I recall correctly ?

There was no OU-branded TCF as far as I'm aware. Other than the one that I screengrabbed from an OU programme for THIS ARTICLE about 10 years ago:

I wonder if that OU branded slide was used internally at Milton Keynes?

Well, that's exactly what I was referring to ! It says The Open University, that's branding by 1970s standards in my book !

I'm assuming there were 3 settings then for that OU text: top left, top right, top left and right. Wonder what the significance of the different settings was?

Even within OU Con, cutting to/from that test signal always resulted in a picture roll (slightly exaggerated on the VHS tape recording here). The same happened with TCF from OU Con.

I know when they switched to OU Con from NC2 for late-night OU, there was always a slight picture sync issue. Was this picture sync issue completely unavoidable (it generally wasn't too bad though)? Someone I spoke with years ago suggested it couldn't easily be eliminated.

This sort of thing really get my inner geek going, I always wish I wasn't just a few years too young to have been able to have seen this sort of thing first hand.

I am just about old enough to remember repeats of 70s OU programmes with bearded presenters in front of boards of complicated equations though. Even at 5 or 6 years old I'd watch them because they were the only thing on at that time at weekends.

Could OU Con be simultaneously in sync with NC1 and NC2? Perhaps that was why the sync issue didn't have an easy fix.

Or were the networks both in sync with each other? I know they often weren't by the time they reached regional centres

They were pretty close, I sometimes measured the difference, usually no more than a line (64us) out, but
you'd expect them to be, both locked to the same master SPG at TC ?