This Morning breakdown

Why do you need an announcer to come on and say 'and now here's a news report' when the next thing on the screen is a caption saying 'News Report' and it's followed by a live newsreader who is about to explain what it's all about?

There's no need to have an anouncer just for the sake of it

I agree it should. We never had a live CA on HTV Wales until about 12.30pm during the 1998-2002 era, and then of course all of our announcements were recorded between 28th October 2002-January 2006.

Surely there doesn't need to be announcer to introduce a the news on a Breaking News story? Other TV Networks just cut to the newsfeed with a sting.

Here's todays ordeal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TV7UGC7LOU

Love the way Fearne assures ''this has never happened before.'' yeh right.

OMG how many times did the announcer say "this is ITV1, we're having a few problems". Very funny though.

Probably catering to those with a short-memory span.

Crashing sound desks seem to be fairly common these days - wasn't it UTV News that fell victim to it not too long ago?

What benefits to these fancy desks offer over the previous generation of desks?

Sound desks fail, whether they are traditional analogue or the newer digital ones.

Sound technicians are always good for an opinion on one desk over another. Its just a damned shame I can never find two who agree.

A good installation would have allowed for redundancy for the main console. If you set it up properly then it could have been as close to seamless switching as would have made any difference.

If they haven't allowed for that already, you can bet they will soon.

Digital desk - lot more features in a lot less space, fairly reliable
Analogue desk - simple, big and more reliable

On the other hand, I've got more experience of analogue desks playing up than digital ones, but when an analogue one goes down, you can normally convince it to play ball with a little re-routing (which can normall be done without people noticing). This breakdown sounded less like the mixer had crashed, but more like a digital desk with an operater interface that had decided that it was going to choose what came out rather than the sound guy.

Thanks for that - I missed the first part with Phil giving them a microphone to hold between themselves! To me it would have seemed better to pull the interview before they'd said anything rather than get them to do that but I guess they maybe didn't know the seriousness of the problem.

I think Fern & Phil tried their best to keep things going without resorting to taking the programme off-air. So really all credit to them for dealing with such a big problem during a live show.

I doubt many presenters would've considered sharing mics just to keep going and get away with it for the short time they did. I'm sure it was a gallery instruction to try it, but it takes some bottle on the part of the presenters to give it a go.