BBC TWO Breakdown

Tonight's Learning Zone on BBC TWO was struck down by serious technical problems. A rather stretched static BBC TWO menu caption appeared instead of the usual LZ menu rundown. After repeated failed attempts to get rid of the menu, an apology caption was put out.

The first OU programme was then postponed. Short filler programmes were broadcast from c. 0040.

There are some images on the TAKE TWO section of THE TV ROOM now. I'll update the page further later in the day with more images and video of the whole incident.

http://www.tvhome.f2s.com/upload/BBC%202%20breakdown2.jpg
I love this apology caption!! With purple writing - novel!
http://www.tvhome.f2s.com/upload/ou.jpg

Did you notice how wonky the lettering was on this caption? The top line is very much out-of-line with the rest of the paragraph, and the second half also looks like it was keyed in separately to the first half!!!

Yes indeed. A bit crap. There's even a double space between 'the' and 'break' on the first line!!

Is that geeky or anoracky enough...

BBC Two need to tweak that caption before we have to see it again.

I can see what's happened. I bet it was typed in Microsoft bl***dy Word, and whereas the first two lines were left to wrap automatically, the third line was proceeded by a Carriage Return (Paragraph Mark) leaving a wider line spacing than the other two 'lines'.

And as very often happens on Word (or any Windows package), you very often can't tell if you've got a single or double space between words just by looking.

I wish somebody would come up with a Word Processor that looks a bit more WYSIWYG - a bit like Adobe Acrobat.

Well, this is a complete guess. I would have thought that some sort of Quantel device would be used, but given that Weather graphics (and presumably, Pres captions) have recently moved to PC-based applications, they could be prone to the old Windows vaguries.