Perhaps Red Bee need to work on their training for their announcers. Presumably in both those clips, the announcer had a script already worked out to introduce the next programme - I'm not saying I'd do any better, but I'd hope that a professional voiceover wouldn't be knocked off their stride so much that they couldn't ad lib their way into what's written on the bit of paper in front of them.
This is the problem - handling breakdowns is, presumably, one of the justifications for retaining live announcers. If that's the best they can do, are they at risk of some DQF beancounter deciding that a CD of generic breakdown announcements would be cheaper? And would it actually be better than some of the recent breakdown announcements we've seen?
The answer is, of course, no - there have been some excellent examples of how it should be done, like this one from May when the News Channel fell apart and failed to play the weather just before 6am, and BBC1 pulled a menu and rundown out of the bag
Obviously when the problem is a technical failure in the pres suite there's a limit to how creatively the breakdown can be handled, but should it really take 30 seconds of black to get the fault caption on air? And running the programme early so the nations' junctions looked amateurish too is unforgivable.
I was thinking about that after I made my post - you'd think that a menu and rundown would be the default choice for a breakdown during a junction. Though I do wonder if that example from 6am was a prerecorded announcement - again, not a very strong argument for live announcers!
I think you can cut them some slack for not having a menu in yesterday's case - if the failure is the pres suite itself (rather than with a programme coming into it) then an emergency cut to the breakdown caption (which comes from a dedicated device that is independent of the playout automation) and announcer booth sound may be all they can manage while they reboot whatever has gone down.
There is, perhaps, an argument to make the announcer's booth more like the 4th floor cons, with a simple mixer that has the breakdown slide and a simple slidestore containing menus available, and some means of playing music. That would bring us back to a situation where the announcer could fill any break and let the director get on with restoring normal service.
The problem with having a menu ready is that it has to be an up to date one, especially in the evening. In the morning an evening menu is fine... but at 8pm an evening menu is partially out of date unless it's updated at every junction. I've no idea how it's done now, but years ago it the menu caption was semi-automatic.... it pulled the schedule details into the capgen automatically but the director had to actually initiate the process, and do some text editing/formatting. Therefore it was only done a couple of times a day
But as has been said, chances are that the fault that was preventing the trails was also getting in the way of anything else than the breakdown loop being put to air
Slightly odd problems going into the Daily Politics there. Trailers finished and then we got an ident but no voiceover. This suddenly crashed into another trailer which then froze for around 10 seconds before the Daily Politics started.
on another note the DP aston generator seems to be broken and is currently throwing up this
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/6973/g34f.png
Perhaps Red Bee need to work on their training for their announcers. Presumably in both those clips, the announcer had a script already worked out to introduce the next programme - I'm not saying I'd do any better, but I'd hope that a professional voiceover wouldn't be knocked off their stride so much that they couldn't ad lib their way into what's written on the bit of paper in front of them.
It was awful, I'm afraid she's from the school of broadcasting, that seems to imagine unless you talk continuously, the transmitters will switch themselves off, so just keeping making a noise, even if it's random drivel