Capital In Crisis

Very true. If London was affected then ITV would be in a real pickle. GMB, This Morning etc would be all out. It'd be interesting to see what would be broadcasted instead.

I'm sure there was one occasion during the Carlton era where Gas Street suffered a power failure or similar so the Midlands were fed London instead. I'm guessing there was no facility for Lenton Lane to pick up TX at this point.

I think on that occasion NI's schedule was more similar to what Wales were intending to show than network's.

BBC Scotland took some flack for putting out London News in lieu of Reporting Scotland when the fire alarm went off during the Six, they just stayed with the dirty network feed until they were back in the building and able to start Rep Scot. Nowadays they would get the News Channel, but it might be that the arrangement for another nation to sustain was a result of that.

I believe the nations can, with a bit of notice, run a separate service for a nation that is having trouble, they each have a spare continuity suite and copies of each others' idents, if so BBC1 Wales might be from NI and BBC 2 Wales from Scotland.

Going back to the old ITV network in the TV:AM days; I understand that the regional TV stations were connected to their respective transmitters via BT Tower in London and that when it came to switching between them and TV:AM, or Thames and LTW, this involved pulling out a cable in the tower and plugging another one in, in its place. So, if the ITV stations relied on BT Tower to link them to its transmitters and the tower went down in this London-wide power outage, then that suggests all regional ITV companies would be cut off.

MCR2 are still involved in creating packages in BNCS, but the gallery in Salford then select them themselves.

On the subject of BBC nations supporting each other - one morning the sync pulse generator in Glasgow went a bit wonky, which meant they were unable to opt during Breakfast. Belfast fired up a spare pres suite, took in the London sustaining feed and the Bulletin Control Room from Glasgow, and their 'reserve' BBC 1 Scotland was fed to Coding & Mux. It was all fixed just after 9 o'clock, but it did come very close to the 0915 junction being broadcast with Scottish trails and idents and marksi's voice on the announcement.

Not via BT Tower, but certainly via the local BT switching centre (for Thames/LWT that was BT Tower of course).

Same applied to the BBC stations until a few years ago.

This also reminds me of a time in the 'ITV Hearts' era when something went massively wrong during This Morning. It went off air for ages, with Granada (GMG North) showing a generic ITV-branded hearts caption with music, along with the continuity announcer, possibly Bob Preedy, periodically apologising for the problems. This was around 2000 or 2001. I could get fringe reception from both Yorkshire & HTV Wales. Yorkshire was showing the exact same thing as Granada, as you would expect. HTV had a static image of a baby that looked not too disimilar to the Nirvana 'Nevermind' album cover. The baby was probably not in water but the reception was snowy (this was analogue, of course). HTV had their own music over this and their own CA periodically apologising. After a good 10/15 minutes of this, HTV Wales put some other programme on, though I've no idea what it would've been. GMG North just kept the same slide throughout. Then, perhaps another 10/15 minutes or so, HTV Wales somehow got This Morning back. This was a long time before GMG North did though and I think it was a good half an hour or so later that they finally got back to the programme. I remember watching This Morning on this snowy HTV Wales channel and Judy talking about something in or of Yorkshire and finding it ironic that no one from Yorkshire was watching.

Anyone know what would have caused what happened on this day or why HTV Wales got the programme back a good while before GMG North did?

Which, (going back to the original post) how TV-am managed to get on
the air on Oct 16th 1987 from Thames. I suspect BT were able to connect
Thames to the rest of the network quite easily, Thames obviously had
power, as did the BT Tower. Also, it's a very short distance between
where Thames was at Euston and the BT Tower, just a few hundred yards,
so the cable would have had no active (i.e mains powered) booster points.

How much of the UK saw the emergency broadcasts on BBC 1 and ITV
that morning I wonder? Presumably as long as the BT paths made it out
of the South East the only regions affected were South West, West, South,
South East and East ?

I'm in the Hannington Tx area, only BBC 1 was working from there, and
it was RBS'ing Crystal Palace. Rowridge (and therefore TVS and BBC South)
were dead, (and remained dead until about 21:00hrs that evening)

At 18:30 we got Newsroom SE from Elstree, and for our benefit there
was a five minute bulletin from Southampton presented by Bruce Parker.
TVS had an hour long edition of Coast to Coast presented by Fred Dinenage
and Fern Britton from Southampton, but it wasn't seen in the western half
of the region ironically

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9TbwH-Kb8bs#t=103

(What a miserable damp squib of a cheap programme Meridian News is today, compared to
almost 30 years ago, progress I presume !)

Before LBC became part of Global and were owned by Chrysalis they had a disaster recovery arrangement with TalkSport. There was one morning when TalkSport and LBC were coming from adjacent studios

It really shows the attention to detail of the BBC that they would go to that trouble to ensure Scottish continuity for a programme which was presumably going out UK-wide (yes I know that network trails might have had the wrong time for Scottish viewers, but still...)

I seem to remember one occasion was at the weekend, so the Midlands got LWT for a while.

No, me too.

On the subject of BBC, I thought the Mailbox in Birmingham was the backup for continuity. I thought in 2000 whenever there was the big power failure at TVC, that News came from Millbank but was routed via Birmingham.

If something similar happened with news now would they still use Millbank for news or would they go elsewhere?