BBC One

Whoops ... that one slipped under the radar, Apologies.

Did anyone cap the new sunshine-themed programme menu earlier on? I think it was before or after The One Show.

does anybody have a clue what is happening this morning, big question is terrible, with the cut offs and whatnot!

They can't keep this going for much longer, surely?

Is no-one about at Red Bee?

I can't believe they let it stay on air for over 15 minutes with that problem - the apology slide appeared about 20 times! And after they finally curtailed the show, they left the audio running and Nicky Campbell said something on top of the BBC One announcer going into Escape To The Country.

Just come off air. (Nicky Campbell apologised!)

Now Escape To The Country!

What is the usual procedure for handling breakdowns?

At what point do you decide '**** it!' & goto a standby programme?

It is an odd way to handle the problems isn't it. www.bbc.co.uk/one and my EPG are still showing the program as The Big Questions.

They must have wanted to get to half past the hour so they could show a 30 minute filler but the show should have been curtailed sooner, in my humble opinion, as the faults were too messy and frequent (even if this would have meant displaying the breakdown slide with music/radio for a few minutes).

Here's the final 4 minutes of the problems; this had been going on for a good 15 minutes:

http://s176.photobucket.com/albums/w191/2007TopGearDog/thebigquestionsfault.flv

Can anyone work out what Mr Campbell uttered over the ident?

I think I heard a bit of it. I'll put it in a spoiler tag because it could be wrong and if you read what I think it is before you listen to it yourself then you won't be able to hear anything else.



The programme page for this episode says "Sorry, this programme is not available to watch again here but is currently available on these devices: Selected wi-fi/3G enabled mobile phones." I assume this is a mistake and the programme will be available to watch later, but I wonder why this message is even available on the programme page. Under what circumstances would the BBC only have the rights or wish to show something on a mobile phone but not on a more traditional device?

I think that must be a mistake, but I've seen similar messages when I've gone to view a programme shortly after air.

I assume its down to how long it takes to encode for the differing platforms.

My HTC phone tells me that Doctor Who is available in WiFi at 63MB or 3G at 36MB.

Those smaller formats are probably faster to encode, and so will be available more quickly.

Well, that certainly makes sense.

Now... subtitles.

The Big Questions is a live programme and in common with other live BBC shows, the subtitles appear a word at a time rather than a sentence at a time as they would on recorded shows. The subtitles were also interrupted when the programme was interrupted because presumably the person producing them was sitting at home seeing and hearing the same as we were.

If and when The Big Questions makes it to iPlayer, I wonder if it will have the breaks in the programme and if it will have subtitles. If it doesn't have the breaks but does have subtitles, I wonder if they will have been amended to reflect the iPlayer version of the programme or if they will have confusing gaps and the CA announcements where the break downs were in the broadcast version.

When Escape to the Country was shown instead of The Big Questions, it did not have any subtitles for the first 4 minutes. After 4 minutes it got live subtitles. 16 minutes in to the programme and the recorded subtitles started but were slightly out of sync with the audio. After a few minutes of this, the subtitles disappeared completely again. Live style subtitles then came back 10 minutes before the end of the programme before being replaced with recorded subtitles once again for the final few minutes of the programme.

I wonder why this is. I thought Red Bee/BBC would have all kinds of clever equipment that would automatically put subtitles to air for pre-recorded shows like this. Maybe they were fighting to override some automated system that knowing that The Big Questions was meant to be on air (someone mentioned that the EPG did not update either) would only display the output from the live subtitle system.

I notice that during The Big Questions, the programme itself placed a caption on screen apologising for the breakdowns, you could tell this was done by the programme and not the channel because when the programme disappeared from the screen, so did the captions.


Apparently, the second half of show went ahead despite not being broadcast.