End of the road for UTV?

It’s presumably automated it, isn’t it? Though it should be checked, I agree.

It should be checked, and it was a terrible gaffe to make (although many outside of the forum seem amused at the 'Freudian slip' rather than horrified). However, it is perhaps forgivable that it wasn't checked at a time when staffing is lower than usual for obvious reasons.

As a side note I love how appalled some seem to be at the apparent slip in standards as if UTV were previously unimpeachable purveyors of high quality continuity.

Yes, shouldn't have made it to air but presumably less staff in the process than normal at the moment.

It begs the question why another continuity gaffe made it to air this evening before Rare Breed . Two continuity cock ups for UTV viewers in under 24 hours.
There is clearly a fundamental problem at ITV with the way it pre-records regional announcements without bothering to check the integrity of them first.

I'm beginning to wonder whats gonna be said before the new series of UTV Life this Thursday. They'll probably introduced it as 'UTV Live' instead of 'Life'

Not thinking properly before opening your mouth, not listening to what you're reading out, ad libbing and coming out with gibberish, and not understanding what you're saying has been the staple diet of live broadcasting from my earliest memory of the radio and telly.

We don't know whether the script was incorrect, or whether the announcer made the mistake, but with gazzilions of channels and fewer and fewer people to administer them, it's remarkable this doesn’t happen more often.

It's disappointing on the face of it that the announcer didn't clock that perhaps, just perhaps the word should be Stormont considering it was a UTV announcement, but did he even know he was recording a UTV announcement?

I know on this occasion the announcer didn’t, but do they normally say “Now on UTV” when recording the local announcements?

Well, maybe, but how low are standards allowed to drop before it stops being "forgivable"? If nobody's able to check continuity announcements to see if they actually get the name of the programme right - which is the whole point of the announcement - and don't get them embarrassingly and quite offensively wrong, they probably shouldn't be doing them at all. You can't just let anything go and go "never mind, Covid". If a newspaper libelled someone, saying "well, normally we'd have checked it but we're short staffed so we let it go" is no excuse.

It's insulting to the many people who are working hard across all broadcasters to keep standards high. All broadcasters are short staffed and working with limited resources, and this forum certainly isn't bearing that in mind when slagging them off.

Maybe not, but at least Ulster Television was coming from Ulster.

Stormfront - either an Apple experts shop in Telford, or a pan-European white nationalist, white supremacist, antisemitic, Holocaust denial, and Neo-Nazi Internet forum.

Hmmm.

..... Or the new primetime vehicle for GMB's Laura Tobin, as she tours the UK looking at damage caused by wild weather.... . .

I haven't watched regularly, but from what I've seen from local announcements recently, they don't seem to reference either UTV or ITV, and just say things like "Now, it's..."

The phrase that's missing in this debate is "not for the want of trying".

Announcers do make occasional mistakes, and always will; however before making the mistake they should have made all endeavours not to make the mistake.

Before writing a script (or simply reading out something someone else has written for you) you do your research... and checking a programme name is the most basic bit of research an announcer should be capable of.

Aside from that, any announcer should be more than familiar with the schedule of the channel they are the voice of.

When considering someone for the post of announcer on a high-profile UK-wide TV channel, one of the prerequisites should be a good general knowledge. Blaming autocorrect or saying that he's never heard of Stormont just isn't good enough. You should never read out something on-air without knowing what it is that you are saying; this is basic.

If you are not going to place the ability to do research, fact check, know the schedule, or have basic general knowledge high up your list of criteria for applicants to the role of announcer... you need to have other procedures in place... such as a channel editor with those skills who will review and approve scripts before they go to air.

Ultimately the blame here lies with itv.

Yes the mistake made was embarrassing, but ultimately trivial. The next mistake might just be more than that, it might be costly.