Noel on Strike

Well, the way it begins is identical to NTV in that they switch to an unsuspecting viewers' house, and then they're invited to singlong with the guests and fill in the missing lyrics. I don't know how they do it. Actually they announced they were going to do a whole series based on this premise with Alan Carr, but nothing seems to have come from that. Maybe I imagined it.

I must say, I'm so pleased this Noel thread I started is still going strong after nearly two years. Testament to how much interest there is in Noel's movements, I suppose (and how often the papers recycle the same story about it coming back).

This is an extremely long thread, and what I’m about to ask may have already been covered - if so, apologies.

In the earlier series during, I think, NTV, when Noel explained to viewers who the “victim” was going to be, he stated that they were seeing alternative footage on their own TV so they had no idea of what was to come. How would this have been achieved - with 90s technology? Was the victim watching a “video” remotely hooked up to their TV, or what?

Again, sorry if this has been discussed/answered.

There was something done for one of those AntnDec shows (this decade) that involved a terrestrial SHF link from Portsmouth I think, to Meridian's news studio at Whitely, and from there up their contribution feed to Chiswick. That was presumably to acheive a low latency feed ?

From what I recall reading, there was always a different feed sent to the viewer's tv that would have the sound from their house removed so that there was no feedback when they went over to them live. How this was achieved I'm not sure, but it basically meant a different version of BBC1 was being fed from the OB truck into their home purely for NTV. From this point it wasn't too much of a leap to split the visual output so Noel could pre-warn the rest of the audience what was about to happen. I'm guessing a second gallery might have been used at TVC to achieve this? In later series they generally did this during a show promo (as in the video above), though earlier on they often did a fake breakdown.

In the infamous one we've been talking about, it appears from Noel's frantic spiel during the "nowhere to hide" VT that the idea was to see Woody's reaction to his neighbour Chris being surprised, which of course they couldn't do, so that explanation of what was going to happen was a bit redundant in the end.

Mix-Minus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix-minus

A second gallery seems excessive. A VHS machine in the truck and an RS toggle switch would have been enough I would have thought particularly if it's intended as a fake breakdown.

Yes, a second ME (or spare router feed) from the truck's vision mixer, and an aux output from truck's audio desk. Presumably the 'victim' was selected as being totally non tech savvy, and (generally very unobservant) because if it was me, I'd notice no end of untoward things going on inside and out !

What has helped, is episodes keep on appear and the way things are going we have another 6 months of this With the rest of this year seeing how S7 plays out at least.

If we go back to the question you asked at the top of this thread, it still somewhat unclear who or what is to blame for the problems of the series from Series 6 onwards. Maybe it wasn't all Paul jackson fault ( I still have raised eyebrow with him but that is by in by)

It's clear there were some awful mistakes and lack of ideas, but was it noel? was it director? was it new producers? was it the comedy time? If you look at the 97 xmas ep, the two coppers from the bill come back, even though it bad jokes, it just seems funnier. It highly possible there were deep level disagreements going in BEFORE the public burst up, and that why noel went public.


I still can't understand WHY MR Blobby was banned in Series 8, there seems to be some false beliefs he was used to fill up the gaps and yet thought S7 and the return of s7 he never been that overpowering..

Also in this clip is ANT N DEC, and few others.. ( last episode of 1997)







Its about to surpass the other one! https://tvforum.uk/tvhome/noels-house-party-41748/ however Miss Priscilla Prim videos have gone private....

Although on a couple of occasions the victim, said allowed they had wondered why the flower arrangement on top of the tv had moved slightly once the penny dropped where the minicam actually was.

I'd love to know exactly how the tech set up worked.

Taking a best guess, the hidden (or camouflaged) mini cams and mics were battery powered and the tx ariels were sending the signal to the receiver on the PSC camera nearby, which was cabled, so had a direct feed back to the unbranded OB unit parked just out of sight, down the road?

I think the neighbour made it there very quickly. Watching it back a few times, it looks like he just wanders out of the room next door to Chris.

Noel's website noel.world where he posted updates about his Lloyds Bank fraud case (sometimes with video updates) just gives you a blank page now, too. The YouTube channel has been deleted.


I used to visit that site every so often, it was quite bizarre and had an online radio station with spoof ads, themed music, and interviews of Noel by Noel.

The early ones with a very small truck (BBC OB Link 11 - painted with something like Satellite Systems to disguise it - despite it not having a satellite dish on it) simply took the off air feed of BBC 1, sent it to the truck, which then used the vision, but the audio was substituted with the clean feed from London which arrived via 141MHz or 215MHz links.
It was remodulated onto the UHF band, and fed back to the telly, and the BBC 1 button retuned to the output from the truck.

Later ones may have had reverse vision feeds, but it would have been difficult to start to hide all this kit in a residential street.