Late Edits

That was a fairly regular occurrence for lots of late edit programmes and routine for sports highlights. In fact it wasn't unknown to start playing the first bit of a programme while they were still editing the rest of it. You had to hope they finished before the first tape had run out. Only when you were into the second tape did you know how long the programme was going to be.

Wasn't there a Channel 4 documentary in the late 90s, that stopped after the first break, and the continuity announcer had to announce that the rest of the documentary simply wasn't ready to air? I remember Steve Williams mentioning it on here once - I'm sure he can fill us in on the full details.

Also, the Channel 5 cricket highlights are still edited in this manner - as the day's cricket is frequently still going on when the Channel 5 highlights programme begins. So the Sunset and Vine team are cutting the last portion of the highlights programme as the programme has started to go out on the air. This article discusses a particularly challenging situation, the day that England clinched the Ashes in 2013: http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/aug/17/england-ashes-channel-five-highlights - there was discussion at the time as to whether they do still edit on tape or whether the author was using 'tape' as shorthand for some kind of server/EVS device.

Yes often the case on ITV, although a lot easier there I'd imagine where the programme is by definition in separate parts, it must be a lot harder when there's no forced junctions in a programme!

Yes! It was in January 1999, a documentary about office parties which had been filmed over Christmas. The first part went out alright but the second half wasn't finished and they had to show some filler, then the next programme, and finally the second half after that.

It's been recalled elsewhere that That's Life were regularly spooling back to a clock as they were being introduced.

A modern version of this being the Baftas, which is airing whilst it is still going on, and the edit has gone a bit wrong on occasion.

As Rob says, That's Life were notorious for spooling back to the clock while continuity were announcing them. One one occasion they had an evacuation during the recording so they had to go with the recording and try to pick up and do the rest of the show live.

I had to do it (lace up and play in a sports tape to the gallery live) on a late night sports program. The key thing was to remain calm about lacing the tape up and getting it right whilst keeping the gallery up to date with what stage you were at. A regular occurrence for the gallery and they were very calm about it.

Of course news programs work like this all the time.

There's that infamous edition of the One O'Clock News from the late 80s with gallery talkback where at the start of the bulletin, NONE of the reports were ready- so they had to go straight into an interview.

Philip Hayton's first time presenting it, in fact.



"I haven't got any scripts Mike!"

That's a different one to the one I was thinking of, Michael Burke did that one.

When I was working on Challenge TV transmission, reversioned editions of Eggheads were, for some reason, only turning up on the day of TX. On one occasion, the courier delivered the tapes to the wrong building, and by the time someone had run over to bring them back from TVC to the Broadcast Centre, we had just enough time to spin through the tape to check the timecodes matched the TX report. All was fine until the second of the two episodes, when we realised we were getting a lot of the questions right - the post house had managed to give us the second part of the first episode again.

These days with EVS, you can do the equivalent of a 'live pause' on a PVR - so your cock-ups can go a lot closer to the wire. I've recently had to deal with a football highlights show played out from the edit suite at 2130 for a 2200 TX. Which is fine if they manage to play it at the right time....