ITV Breakfast

That sounds like complete nonsense anyway. Without the keys, and the TVS crew to fire up the truck (and the genny) what and who from TV-am was actually being proposed ? In any case the cameras associated with the truck were all rigged inside the conference centre. The only possible use of TVS's equipment might have been their vision link back to London (for ITN and C4 use) to playout ENG material into, but that probably had a mid point, and would have also required manning. Some of TVS's staff might have been in nearby hotels, others could well have been at home. By the time anything could have been sorted out, with enough key staff, it would have been 09:25 and game over....

At the heart of all of it was, of course, as a cost cutting exercise, TV-am's OB unit had been called back to London the night before, and that was really where TV-am's problems lay, not in not being able to access TVS's OB units. It lead to TV-am having John Stapleton on the line from Brighton, with a slide of his photo and the caption "John Stapleton, reporting from Brighton" That's all it boiled down to, cost cutting by TV-am, which was cruely exposed.

It wasn't just his photo though there was a photo of the hotel too... a stock photo of it years before the bombing of course.


How far we've come in 35 years, nowadays it would be very different but of course in 1985 the viewers expectations were very different too

I'd been in that hotel (The Grand) for a beer a couple of weeks earlier (and after the bomb had been planted) because I was attending IBC 1984 (the first I ever attended) Seems a lifetime away (oh, it was !)

Must be scary to think you were actually there at the same time as the bomb, knowing it could have gone off before it was meant to.

I hadn't realised it was in place for so long before it went off. Yikes

We stayed in there a few years ago and I made a point of finding the room, even though the room with the same number today is in a totally different place to where it was.

All these years on it felt odd being in a building that I was first aware of because it was torn apart by a bomb. The pictures of the hotel with the big smoking gash in the front are so well known and iconic

Yikes!

Returning to the thread. In the early 1980's any breakfast station would have needed to be near major communication hubs even if they were just acting as a "feed for regional programmes and London at the time was the only option.

Weren’t you also near the location of one of the 1999 London nail bombs on the day it happened? Or was that someone else on here who posted that? If not you’ve had some close calls!

You're right, I also stayed in a hotel room next to Benazir Bhutto once, and had armed guards sat in the corridor outside. 😬

And wasn't Stapleton sitting in his own hotel room, watching the BBC and basically just repeating what they'd said?

I'm sure that never happens 😉

Perish the thought