Dick and Dom on Radio 1

I thought the emergency "tape" could be played out in two ways:

From BH via the silence detector - this is a pain in the arse because to regain control neatly the DJ has to get a feed from BH up as an outside source on the desk then get control room to pass control back, very much like a soft-opt in regional TV terms.

From the playout system directly - used for fire alarms such as the morning Yalding was evacuated twice during Moyles's show. Has the advantage that the DJ can just fade it out yourself once back in the studio.

It would have been this studio copy that a certain Nicky Campbell replaced with a "best of Campbell" show when he left Radio 1 and was broadcast during a fire alarm.

Colin used to do the overnight show several years ago - was Colin covering because there was a problem with the feed from Brum where most of the overnight stuff comes from these days?

The networks all pass through a control room in BH anyway, who can control the studio feeding the network, although with Radio 1 I believe they can pass control themselves. There's a stack of DAT machines there too.

Of course, there is an emergency radio broadcasting centre out of London, in case BH has any major problems.

Isn't it BBC.R1 with a dot in-between? Classic FM's version, if I recall the wisdom of Nick Harvey correctly, changes from "Classic[SPACE]" "[SPACE]Classic"

But on Radio 1 often, there is a long silence with nothing at all, not even background music, so wouldn't the silence detector just play the music each time there is a silence (almost all the time) or is there a timer, so if it's silent for more that 30 seconds or so, it'll start playing, instead of it going off each time a DJ forgets to push the Transmission button?

I'm sorry, I don't follow.

Even i'm a bit lost....
When you listen to Radio 1, there is always a silence, on purpose, so shouldn't the Silence detector play automatically, or is it done manually???

I'm sure a manual silence detector has many merits.

When is there always a silence on purpose?

Chris Moyles sometimes plays The Emergency Tape Game, does that count?

Two minutes' silences? They usually play in "ambient silence" to defeat the silence detector...

sorry to drift off the R1 subject but just now ive been listening to the football commentary on MAGIC 1152 here in the north east. sunderland were observing a minutes silence before the game, so of course there was silence on the radio. after about 30 seconds of silence analogue MAGIC 1152 switched to MAGIC 1152 DAB who were commentating on the newcastle match ( ). then, when audio returned to analogue MAGIC 1152 they switched back to the sunderland game ( ). so it seems it only takes 30 seconds for the emergency tapes (or the switch to DAB in this case) to kick in at MAGIC 1152. i know this has nothing to do with R1 but i thought it was worth posting while we are discussing emergency tapes and stuff.