LWT (ITV 1)

This might have just happened on LWT @ about 9.05pm today (2/06/2002) on LWT instead of showing the LWT ident they showed a giant ITV 1 logo on a blue background. Then the announcer said you’re watching ITV 1 instead of saying you’re watching LWT, which is quite strange.

As well as the "giant" ITV1, there's also a giant crown, as it's a generic Jubilee ident for this weekend only.

I've not spoken with Trish at LWT this evening, but I suspect she thought saying "LWT" over an "ITV1" ident would sound a bit silly, so didn't.

The slightly amusing fact about the ident is that the "royal" colour is purple, so the ident is that colour; making the Carlton regions use an ident that looks "Granada" coloured.

No Nick, he's talking about a different ident. I've seen it once on LWT too...it's simply blue background (nothing fancy) with the itv 1 logo in yellow in the middle of the screen.

In that case it would be the "ident to whole network" version.

Was it used before or after an unplanned news about the Palace fire I wonder?

That seems likely, as Trish would have done a "button 2" anouncement to the whole network to cover for locals who didn't have anything pre-recorded. Same as Glen did when the Queen Mother passed away.

The ITV News Report came straight on, so this couldn't have been the reason for it

(In my opinion "Button 2" should be disabled! )

i few weeks back on Granada they said now on ITV1 with the Granada ident and i thought oh no its happening they r getting just the 1 name but it only happend 1 time

If you noticed the commercials before the ITV1 slide - there was a problem with them...so I expect there was a tech error and the slide was the most available thing to put on air at the time .....the announcer would match that with appropriate wording...

Here we go then, Logie was right. It was a, plain and simple, technical problem.

This from an e-mail received from Trish, herself:-

"Please put the forum out of their misery and tell them that we used the ITV1 slide because the comms server had packed up - and the whole junction went pear shaped with idents/promos being ejected! Basically the computer threw a wobbly and the ITV1 slide was the only thing we could get up on the screen in a hurry!"

Agreed. In an ideal world of course we'd all still have separate continuity, but at least the, ahem, "regional"
centre is better than this button 2.....

Something happened on TTTV the other day, just before the regional weather at 6.30. What we saw was a static [itv1], but this was actually the transmitter displaying it's own locally generated caption. It happened because Leeds were unable to play out the regional weather at 6.30, and didn't have any other video to feed through - the transmitter assumed there was a link failure. Interestingly, the TX logic circuit allowed the Leeds announcer to talk over the locally generated image. This doesn't happen too often, but the logic system does allow this sort of thing these days.

This is probably not what happend for what you saw on LWT though. Sounds like the caption was manually forced through after some technical probs.

Seems unlikely - there is always video leaving Leeds be that grey screen or the wrong channel. If you get me the date of the problem I can try and get the error report from inside

Errrm, can't remember which day it was. It wasn't that long ago though. But the caption was without a doubt the locally generated TX filler.... I know because we (ntl) are responsible for the maintenance and had to reset the timer. I'll find out the exact date, it was recorded in the log book, however I can confirm that it was what I said it was. Unless of course we just imagined the whole thing

What Leeds was putting out was a signal without any information, which caused the main TX's to switch in their local material. It's recommended that the studio does not transmit video at all if it has nothing to play out. This would totally overide the tx logic. In any case, if a link has gone down, the tx wouldn't receive anything, let alone a grey screen.