ITV Network Transmission Issues

Indeed so, he always ends his bulletins like that!

And there was me thinking people had stopped saying that in the 70s.

Somebody ought to tell Mark Gough that... unless Scousers still say that You can't beat Emma Jesson's "bye bye"

I think it's strange that they kept the Birmingham skyline backdrop though, for a generic bulletin.

Yeah, presume they didn't have access to the greeny blue backdrop some of the regions (Calendar?) use sometimes, presumably to distract from the fact they're pan-regional!

Especially as they've probably also lost a chunk of advertising money, if various regions weren't able to carry the booked ads

They use it every weekend for the East/West simulcast.

The fact they didn't change it for a bulletin seen across most of the country, is quite odd!

I imagine they had alot on their plate trying to get the bulletin together and broadcast. The shot used of the presenter meant that the unitiated wouldn't really know which city the skyline belonged to anyway. I imagine many with have just assumed it was London.

It wasn't one 3-minute bulletin though was it. More like about seven or eight.

If one single franchise missed eight bulletins they'd be kicked for it. This is no different.

I don't understand what you wanted them to do. It was a maintenance problem which stopped the bulletins going ahead - they saw this coming and provided probably the best solution. I'm not normally so pro-ITV (not becuase I'm biased but because I normally disagree with a lot of their actions) but I don't believe they were at fault here.

I'm with Jugalug for this one, they broadcast a bulletin which covered regional news stories from all over Southern England, and at least it was more regional than a national service. A regional service was sustained to an extent, and all other output went out as normal, you can't ask much more from them.

At the end of the day, engineering work needed to be carried out, and managed to do so with the only disruption being one small news bulletin covering a larger area than normal (and I think a lack of regional news during GMTV). Following the recent power failures at Southern Tranmission, I think it's safe to assume the work was vital, otherwise we could be looking a more technical problems later which will cause a lot more disruption than just 1 news bulletin (as we have seen).

It was 1 x 3 minute regional news slot. Hardly a big loss in the scheme of things

Things happen, both news programmes I've worked on have missed bulletins at times due to technical problems. It's not ideal but it will happen

I think the issue is that as recently as 5 years ago, a failure in one building wouldn't have prevented so many regions from opting out.

Given that it was planned maintenance, there could have been a better alternative put into place, such as getting Arquiva or BT Tower to switch the incoming circuits from the regions into the distribution circuits for the relevant region.