Did the BBC 2 Test Card ever have the 1986 "TWO" ident?

Perhaps a station router cut, (from the pres mixer output, to the TCF crate) rather than as a timed source into the mixer.

I can't answer why, as I waasn't in TVC, and would have gone home when the OU started (if BBC 1 was on a film and then closedown or had already closed for the night).
I would have thought that the TCF crate would have been referenced to station syncs, as would the NC 2 mixer and the OU continuity,
So even a matrix switch shouldn't create too much of a disturbance - maybe the VHS recordings of the time are exaggerating the effect of the reduced delay as the mixer is switched out of circuit.

It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that the crate was lashed up somewhere else, with no genlock.

I turned up at an ITV station, that will remain nameless, to discover a 1 inch C Format VTR that was playing out pre complied ad breaks, sat on a box, with its cables strung across the floor.

If you think the technical areas of any broadcaster is always all neat and tidy, and looks like the Starship Enterprise's engine room, think again. (They all start off like that at about a week before acceptance testing, but after that it's all downhill)

OU Con seemed quite prone to non-sync (or at least non-clean) cuts, such as into programmes



and here handing back to NC2 (there's certainly some picture disturbance during the black)


And taking over from NC1

I saw a lot of these night-time cuts live, and some were similar to that 1990 VHS recording. Though in many cases, the picture jump/audio glitch wasn't that noticeable.

For a standard BBC One/Two closedown, as you know, we'd initially have a period of GLITS & black. Just prior to cutting the vision, they used to show 15 seconds or so of pulse & bar - but at some point in the 90s, pulse & bar was replaced by TCF. When TCF appeared, it was continuous tone rather than GLITS.

Difficult to find a decent example of this on YT, as people generally cut off after the clock/symbol. There's the odd example where they stay until TCF appears, but they tend to edit out most of the GLITS. Here's an example which rejoins at the tail end of GLITS just prior to cutting to TCF (2 mins 20 secs in). Again, slight picture disturbance (this also happened with pulse and bar).



Really odd that after TCF disappears in the above clip, eventually, pulse and bar appears - I don't think I've ever seen this happen. Any ideas what was going on there? It looked as though the video signal was pulled, and then put back, with pulse & bar in place.

Back to TCF - when it was used in the morning, prior to Ceefax, the source seems to be genlocked, as seen here, from 2 mins 25 secs in:



A minor detail which very few will care about. But was always curious about why the night-time version wasn't synched, but the early morning TCF could be transitioned out of quite cleanly.

I don't recall seeing TCF with anything other than tone when I was younger apart from one or two occasions, but there seems to be quite a few videos from the early-mid 90s of TCF with music (including the one above).

The morning opening sequence all went through the network vision mixer, whereas the closedown, especially after OU programmes didn't.
People were keen to get off home after the shift would be my best guess.

It doesn't say where that had been recorded, so impossible to say, but likely that a vision circuit needed to be lined up somewhere.
Much easier to equalise it with full field pulse and bar than using ITS.

The OUCON suite at the end of the corridor was an entirely separate operation to NC1 and 2 and could actually play programmes to both networks at the same time, which is why there were holding slides between programmes when one announcer was doing both. It was all U Matic tape based, so bypassed the television centre VTR department, and the announcers loaded the tapes and ran them to the network. I am just guessing here, but presumably because the suite worked to both networks it couldn’t therefore genlock to either (and I’m also guessing that the synchs for the two networks were separate and not necessarily locked to the same master synch). I have heard that each network control room had an OU Switch that put control of the network through to OUCON.

It’s also well known that while a non synch cut from source to source was relatively invisible on television sets, VCRs were far more upset by them, so surviving recordings subsequently uploaded to YouTube make these cuts look far more violent than they actually were.

Were NC1 and 2 able to play out OU transmissions? I've seen some clips where it sounds like the same announcer doing the BBC 2 junction and the OU announcement.

I think the pres suites had Umatic for playing out emergency fillers?

In those dark days of the late 70s when BBC 2 would completely close down at 11:30 and not return until late afternoon, local clusters of transmitters were often kept on, by patching in pulse and bar, or linearity staircase at the primary regional transmitter. This would have been to perform maintenance on the transmitters, and also to set up new relay stations. Back then one new relay was built every week

Yes. Often the giveaway was a crack in the audio, as the SiS coders missed a beat.

Of course the OU transmissions were intended to be recorded. I saw an October 1983 Radio Times this week, (long story). The BBC 1 OU progs are tagged as 'UHF only', that would have saved electricity and wear and tear on the VHF network