The One Show Fire Alarm

Indeed, it is directly above the output monitoring room.

Did Alex state that A Question of Sport was next even though it wasn't? Was that on fire too?

the what?

In a 'recording studio' there would be less need for visual alarms as it'a a recording so they can just go back in after the fire alarm and start from scratch - a live TV or radio programme is very different.

It's quite a complicated issue though, you wouldn't want a system of lights only in a TV studio all the time, when there's no production going on and it's being set up for the next one than you'd want an alarm to go off.

Yes, everywhere is different depending on circumstances, I'd imagine that a studio with an audience would have a different type of alert so not to encourage panic.

Places like tube stations have a similar system whereby a smoke detector or similar will set off an alarm just in the control room*. This will be checked out by the staff first before any alarms are heard by the public to avoid panic. AIUI if the alarm is triggered by a human 'break glass' button then the alarm will go off straight away - the theory being that a human seeing a fire is more accurate than a detector.


*they normally also put out a coded message on the public address systems too... however I can't remember what that code is

I don't know the real name for the thing. It's a room, full of monitors of every BBC Region, Every BBC Channel and a very dirty floor.

So the screen went black for 0.6 seconds (or whatever it allegedly is/was).

How would you cope in a genuine emergency - and that's what it seemingly came across as?!

Most of the time, things go according to plan. Sometimes they don't, and sometimes a fire alarm goes off. Shall we make sure that what gets broadcast goes seamlessly, or shall we make sure that people are actually okay?

Strange pernickety things to consider... but think how you'd deal with it at your workplace.

I think that people were more surprised at how presentation reacted as it transpired that they weren't evacuated. The One Show ran a VT as they left the building, which faded out to black. There were several seconds of black before pres went to an apology caption, which having had several minutes' notice that the programme was going to fall off air at any moment, when the VT finished (particularly as they'll have heard the studio gallery talkback was silent so no hope that the programme would pick up off the back of the VT).

I guess that's the difference between the old 4th floor pres operation and the current set up, in that when a programme fell off air the announcer would self-op the initial filler material (slide, music, menu) leaving the director to get on with getting the programme back on air or getting a filler lined up. Nowadays the announcer has much less control, so the director is having to chase the fault and look after the pres output, so breakdowns and the like are necessarily covered in a much less slick way nowadays, just leaving a silent generic fault caption up wouldn't have been considered acceptable a few years ago.

Up until the 90s, 'presentation' was in effect a live programme in its own right, running for 12, 15 or 18 hours.
As you say, the operation was better staffed, and (in the case of the Beeb) the announcer had their own self opt desk with suitable sources ready to go at short notice.

Today it's not as well staffed, there's a high degree of automation, and the announcers these days, unlike 30 years ago, seen unable to ad-lib any sort of intelligent or informative speech.

We're one of the few counties that still have so called, reactive presentation, and even here it's only provided on Chs 1-5. I suspect its use will diminish further, but whoever writes and programmes the software for playout systems needs to understand properly the requirements of live broadcasting, I don't think they do at the moment, judging by the way recent 'breakdowns' have been handled.