ITV staff to strike

I wonder if there really was "chaos" at the studios like the tabloids suggest.

The idea of prerecording to circumvent a strike would never have been entertained in the old days, although I think the BBC did it a few years ago with one of the Saturday morning kids shows. Although don't Loose Women routinely record about half of their shows?

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/apr/07/broadcasting.ITV
In 2005 they moved"Hit me baby one more time" to TVC for one week and prerecorded Takeaway. This Morning was replaced by the Pope's funeral

Loose Women used to pre-record Thursday and Friday shows on Tuesday and Wednesday (like Paul O'Grady used to) - but since Twitter, Facebook and the like became prominent features on TV, they went live. Not sure if that was one of the reasons, or just a coincidence.

Loose Women went live 5 days a week when Daybreak and Lorraine were launched, as it was sharing a studio with Lorraine which (at the time) also had a commitment to be live 5 days a week. I think it was always difficult to be topical when it was off tape so better all round to be live once the studio had another reason to be used.

Live and Kicking was pre-recorded on a Saturday in 2001 due to a strike. How they managed to still have an audience of kids when they did the recording during the day on a Friday I'm not sure. They said at the start that they weren't live as "TV Centre is closed today" (which wasn't strictly true), however that final series of the show had far less viewer interaction than previous ones so it didn't really have a notable effect on the programme (apart from the final shot at the end of the credits being a time lapse of the studio emptying).

There were ways around that, presumably, given they did L&K Friday for a couple of years with an audience, and of course Fully Booked used to be pre-recorded during the week. Get a couple of stage schools involved and it shouldn't be too hard to organise.

Hadn't realised that the NUJ are taking part in this strike too.

Doesn't seem to be anything obviously amiss with the short bit of GMB I saw.

If they did pre-record This Morning they did an incredibly good job of hiding it! Flicking through on UTV Player I didn't hear a single incorrect time check, and they had a number of segments that weren't explicitly billed as being 'live' but seemed live as they normally would be, including an interview on the EastEnders set, a link to see what was coming up on Loose Women later, and a phone-in. The phone-in IMO seems a risky thing to record as you could still get people phoning in, as even if they didn't give the number to call during a 'coming up' link the phone number was in the background of the shot quite clearly. On the whole though the fact it was recorded was hidden very well, to the extent that I'm fairly sure that they'd set the clock on the oven during the kitchen segment to be correct for the time the segment was airing.

Are you sure it was pre-recorded? Everything you said points to it being live. Would they really pre-record a phone-in?

Phil tweeted yesterday to ask for participants to a phone-in - may or may not have been the one featured today, to be honest.

It's not difficult to know what time it's supposed to be if they record it "as live" given the slot was exactly the same as usual.

Well they managed to fool a lot of people then. I certainly thought it was live flicking through this morning.

If there was a strike on the scale of 1979 now (and yes, I know there won't ever be again for various political reasons, this is hypothetical) would it therefore be a lot easier nowadays to pre-record programmes in advance or run best of compilations on a skeleton service, without having to take the network off air entirely?

I'd say it's almost impossible to take a network off, and replace with an 'industrial action' caption.

The fact that in the main, it's Ericsson Broadcast, and not the transmission suite on the South Bank where the playout comes from, means if there was a potentially crippling strike, someone from ITV would do is pop down to Chiswick, and select a set of programmes lying around on the server and get them to play them out. Viewers would be none the wiser.

There are enough freelancers who would happly cross NUJ/BECTU/ACTT picket lines for the nice little pay packet for keeping the live studio tv embers alight during a strike day.

I'm still amazed the unions allowed members to pre-record programmes for today, yesterday - unless those were crewed by freelancers.

I can remember reading (the Guardian, I think) about the last BBC journos strike, and the NUJ not allowing radio producers to make 30 min filler programmes for Five Live if they were being made explictly to fill the gaps in the schedule. 'best of's, long form docs, review shows that had previously aired on the network - fine. Freshly minted for the occasion - no.