Late Edits

On the open vs switched point, this blog post from Jake Humphrey in his early days of doing F1 at the BBC talks about him being on open and Eddie Jordan etc being switched, and how he had early warning that a VT wasn't going to happen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/jakehumphrey/2009/07/an_earpiece_of_the_action.html

And here's a lovely example of how open talkback can mean your presenters end up hearing everything in the gallery:

Brucie certainly was. I've heard it wasn't uncommon for Tess Daley to have to be told to hurry him up somehow if things were running late.

On the subject of late arrivals, I've had to play out a Part 1 while the final part wasn't on server yet, never something you want to do! Also once had to do a manual playout from tape as a last resort - literally cueing someone behind me to press play. Quite satisfying when it all works and nobody watching at home would know anything was amiss.

I think it was in a documentary showing a whole day in TV that showed Mike Scott totally screw up the end of an episode of The Time The Place because he couldn't work with an earpiece, and ended up falling off air because he wasn't watching the Floor Manager's cue.

This is probably the nightmare late arrival - surely if they knew the film wasn't ready they would have done the menu and music routine to fill?

http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/dsplus/m.php?p=bbc1_latefilm_fault_1991.mp4

I'm no expert on this but maybe there was some sort of error on the tape that wasn't spotted until someone hit go?

Roger Mosey discusses his time producing Today in his new book - and he states that he firmly believed that interviews should be 'produced'. That is to say, that the presenter should be listening to talk-back and be guided by the producer as the interview goes on. He tells of an interview that Sue McGregor gave early on in his tenure, when he suggested a question to her, and she took off her headphones and carried on the interview herself. But it became de-rigeur for interviews to be influenced by Mosey over talkback - he maintains it is a key principle of editing a current affairs programme. I don't know if the current Today editorial staff hold the same levels of 'control freak-ery' as Mosey admits to.

@Blake - there was the famous example of Brucie completely cocking things up back in 2008. It was the semi-final of Strictly and there had been an error in the format which meant that it was discovered that no matter how many people voted for one of the dancers, the points system meant that he would mathematically be unable to avoid the dance-off (because the judges had tied two couples at the top of the leader board). This was discovered somewhat belatedly by the production team, and there was plenty of padding within the results programme, before it was eventually revealed that all three couples would go through to the final the following week, whilst the BBC decided what to do. There was still c.5 minutes until off-air (perhaps longer), and Tess was supposed to interview some of the couples (getting their reaction to this unexpected twist) to fill time, but Bruce started reading the closing link off the autocue straight off the back of the shock announcement. He wasn't able to be stopped, and the SCD production team just ran the credits early and came off air about 5 minutes early, leaving presentation with a hole to fill.

You'd assume that your Dermot O'Leary-s and Steve Jones-es (and the rest of that generation of entertainment presenters) wouldn't do that kind of thing as they are used to receiving talk-back as part of their presenting a live show.

On the day of the BBC power cut in 2000, which of course was also the day England went out of Euro 2000, there was a special Panorama planned about hooliganism, and I had the issue of Aerial from that week which said that when TV Centre lost power, Panorama had to find an edit suite in Belgium at the last minute and do everything from there in a matter of hours, including pixelating faces, adding subtitles and changing the voice-over to reflect England's exit.

To quote from another book, Will Wyatt says that when he started working in Presentation Programmes, although he wasn't going to be working on the actual transmission side, as part of his training he had to run BBC2 one night. He was quite enjoying it, picking up the phone to tell the news that they were going to be on time and all that, and then when Gardeners World came on the producer phoned up and said they'd got the wrong take and any minute now it was going to stop. And the second he put the phone down, it did.

Actually in The Book Of Heroic Failures, which I used to love, there's a bit about a Miss Yorkshire Television where they accidentally transmitted the wrong take and so the show began with Tony Monopoly walking on stage, messing up his opening link, going off and coming back on again.



I know Mike Read didn't wear talkback on Saturday SuperStore, seemingly much to the irritation of the production team. Actually there's most of an episode of the first series of SuperStore on YouTube and it's a total shambles, it must have been a real shock for the producers to go from the unflappable Noel to the hapless Read. And Mark Curry points out in the Blue Peter anniversary book that the presenters first got earpieces when he was there, alongside autocue.



That perhaps wouldn't be so surprising because I remember reading at the time that Scott had to leave The Time The Place because he was going totally deaf.



I love the idea of Brucie being totally unstoppable. You can hardly blame him for everything that went on that night, anyway, it was a bit of a shambles all round. That said, I do know that when Brucie was presenting the TV Times Awards in the early eighties he forgot the final award and started saying goodbye too early, much to the confusion of Robert Mitchum who was waiting to come on. But he remembered halfway through and tried to make it look like he'd meant to do that.

Didn't Blue Peter using autocue and earpieces start with the departure of Biddy Baxter? Much to the relief of presentation because they used to have a habit of overrunning which caused a big headache to get the Six on time.

Talking of talkback, there's this gem from Eurovision 1977...

It came in before Biddy Baxter left, and was based more or less because Yvette Fielding was having terrible trouble with the script, and it was decided that introducing autocue would be better than geting rid of her - and indeed she improved massively and became a very good presenter.

They discuss this in Richard Marson's anniversary book. Biddy didn't like the idea of autocue because she thought you lost a lot of spontaneity. They occasionally had autocue for episodes like the appeal launch where there was a load of info that had to be delivered dead right, but on one occasion the autocue went down and because none of the presenters had learned the script, they stumbled their way through the show and it was a mess, which was presumably why Biddy was a bit suspicious of it. But Mark Curry says that the problem was that you ended up having to learn the script parrot fashion and it became a memory test, whereas with autocue you would still learn the script but didn't have to agonise over every word, and he lobbied hard for it. They had it as a trial for a few shows and they were really good so they got to keep it.

Funnily enough, this is totally contradicted in Blue Peter: The Inside Story, the book Biddy herself wrote in the eighties, where she says that Mark Curry was actually dead against the introduction of autocue because he was an artiste who didn't like being constrained by the autocue. But, though entertaining, I would question some of the stuff in Biddy's book, especially the presenter "quotes" which are often recycled from Blue Peter books she wrote herself, plus the chronology is all wrong in parts.