BBC Parliament Off Air

BBC Parliament is currently off air. It has a live picture of the London skyline with a very blocky caption overlaid saying "BBC Parliament We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with this channel and hope to resume normal service later today".

Is this the annual upgrade? I seem to remember this happened around this time last year? Are the Milbank studios going to finally go component so we can get rid of all the PAL artifacts on Question Time.

Or has an outsourcing deal finally bitten the Beeb with their inevitable cost cutting.I can't remember who runs BBC Parliament for the BBC, I seem to remember it being outsourced.

I'm watching on DCAB presumably the same on all platforms.

SKY too !

http://www.gorillaenterprises.co.uk/upload/uploadFiles/parliament.jpg

Rather crappy cap off my mobile.

It looks like they've replaced their makeshift one with a proper breakdown caption.

http://tvforum.ath.cx:8080/tvftemp/pariliamentbreakdown.jpg

It came back a few minutes ago..

Diffrent parts of Millbank. Question Time is done by BBC Millbank and the picture quality problems aren't just down to it being done by them



It's played out by Millbank Studios: http://www.millbank-studios.co.uk/


Judging by the caption I'd say that they really do just have technical problems!

Millbank Studios, by the way, used to be owned by Granada (so ITV plc these days?). I know someone who worked for them last summer, and she was a little confused when her first payslip came from ITV Yorkshire.

They're just showing looped programming while Parliament's in recess at the moment - maybe someone accidentally recorded over one of the tapes with EastEnders, and while trying to find an exciting Select Committee to use as a filler, put up that emergency caption?

They usually do have a day or two where BBC Parliament does go off air though. Usually, it's Test Card G or Test Card J, though once it was that same picture (well, it's actually a live feed) they used yesterday, but a different caption.

They had a similar thing for News 24 when the BBC had a power cut back in 2000. Similar wording as per the caption above supplied by rts but with the Testcard.