Cirque De Celebrite

Crque De Celebrite has been having lots of problems this year.

I knew it would be interesting when the first thing we saw after the sponsor credit on the first episode was a VT clock, also on the first episode Jenni Falconer kept saying "Due to a technical problem, you may not hear anything when you phone to vote but your vote WILL still be counted". It was later discovered that not all votes were counted so the result was declared void.

This week, as well the picture break up towards the end, they also didn't allow 'red button voting'. They didn't give a reason but said 'for this week only'.

After becoming the face of the fraudulent GMTV competitions, I bet Jenni Falconer regrets taking this job now, even if Cirque De Celebrite is all above board it still looks bad given what we know about other shows.

Rather scary just now when the picture suddenly jammed on a shot of all the celebrities, then slowly started to break up into some very trippy fuzz, as the sound crashed to noise.

http://www.dl.34sp.com/grabs/tvforum/circus/circus.flv

I remember something very similar that happened with an episode of The New Statesman on ITV. It was the final episode
of the first series. It happened part way through the end credits. If I still had the VHS recording of the episode, I'd post a
clip of it ... but then it was 20 years ago! After all this time, I wouldn't thought it could still happen on current TV shows,
especially since the broadcasting technology in use now, is much more technically advanced than it was back then.

I have seen this effect before too (can't think of any examples off the top of my head). It looks like it could be caused by some kind of loop. Its as if they are broadcasting what was broadcast a second ago. Does that make sense?

Whatever the cause, I bet it looked great in HD.

That is exactly what it looks like it is. It's a feedback loop.

They're quite simple, all you need to do to cause one is to route the output of a device back into itself - the output of a VT machine fed back into the input for example.

The effect you get varies depending on several factors including the distance in the loop. I remember once having a situation where the replay device I was using was being fed from one BBC building to a tape machine in another. Co-incidently the output of that machine was being fed back into mine. so whenever I pressed 'stop' it went into a long loop. The material I had loaded was a boxing match and whenever the loop was formed one of the boxers repeatedly puched the other as the image slowly moved up the screen!