Switching to Birmingham

EDIT (Sounds better when read this way) It is always the same guy (It might be Andy Knowles ? )

Bear in mind that each major BBC building has a two letter code, generally based on its location, it shouldn't be *that* difficult to work out it out based on the title of this thread!

Oh!
Err. I did know that

There is a facility for Disaster Recovery playout of the BBC's PSB channels (BBC 1 England and BBC 2 England, BBC 3 & BBC 4) from a BBC building (though some if not all of the technology and the staff there would be Red Bee run). It's not Birmingham, nor Bristol or anywhere else mentioned so far in this thread..... much closer to London and does not have a regional news gallery in it.

It used to be the case that Birmingham was the DR backup; in the days of Pebble Mill and before Red Bee & the Broadcast Centre came along.

the announcers are not live, however you're right in that midlands rarely use a network CA. maybe you're confusing the fact that central tv in birmingham retained live local continuity announcer up until fairly recently (well, longer than most places)

my favourite blast from the past voice wise is the bbc birmingham telephone system hold music. oh the hours of my life i've spent listening to sue beardsmore (who left MT almost a decade ago, and has since left the bbc all together) exalt the virtues of the mailbox whilst waiting for HR to pick up.


they didn't really opt, they sustained network ... although bbc midlands had opted out on bbc one as normal until 6.55, whilst also providing dad's army as a sustaining feed to elsewhere in the country.

steve in pudsey is right, more recent tests took place, iirc it was around the time that ww2 bombsite was being excavated in london?


indeed.

the nature of resilience plans mean that committing the too many details of them to a public forum may not always be the best idea. aside from network, bbc regional operations also have plans in place to sustain both regional tv and local radio coverage in extraordinary circumstances

Elstree?

You might be confusing the old arrangements where various control rooms and edit suites at Pebble Mill could take control of network presentation duties for BBC 1, 2 and World. At one point the studios at the Mill were also involved in providing news programmes instead of those at TVC. As has been mentioned already in this thread, things have changed. When Studio-A closed, news no longer had to make the trip up the M40 and instead use studio facilities at Westminster, Since the move to the Mailbox, new network presentation arrangements have been made at a brand new facility. Youre right in saying that server systems have made things a lot lot easier. In the old days, the day's tapes had to be driven up the M40 to Pebble Mill and a cupboard full of additional programmes (one of which was Dads Army!) was kept there on standby. Now with the majority of programmes preloaded onto Red Bee's servers, it's possible to copy them electronically to other parts of the BBC that might need access to them. Far easier for getting trails to the BBC Nations for example, than playing them out overnight !

Bristol hasn't ever been involved in network presentation backup plans AFAIK, though it used to be possible for it to assume control of transmission across several English Regions simultanously (South, South West and West) for multi-region opts (don't know whether it still is as network distribution paths have changed in recent years). Last time I was aware of this happening was in about 2004 and I think it was on BBC-2!

Birmingham remains an important centre in the BBC and several important departments and technical bits of infrasrtucture are based there, but it isn't quite the big player it once was in saving the day should the baloon go up.

When the construction work started on what is now the Westfield shopping centre it was thought likely that they would stumble upon the odd WWII bomb (there was a tube depot on the site and it hadn't been developed since the war). If one had been found the evacuation area would have included TV Centre.

For a year or so (this must have been about 2002/3) the evacuation plans for TV Centre were souped up. This wasn't just for the broadcast critical stuff, production staff and facilities also had their own plans for continuity because everyone might have been out of the building for a week or more

Yep - though even the Beeb got confused between NC, NT and NO and Norwich, Newcastle and Norwich when they launched the BBC One English regional variants... (They were wrong during the initial testing... )

Trails to the BBC Nations are still played out overnight..... not sent electronically.... yet.

is that on an internal channel? And does London put the graphics on or is it a clean feed that the nations then tinker with?

Alongside the 9Mbs MPEG2 network 1 and network 2 feeds introduced with digital TV there was a 9Mbs "clean feed" stream added as well for each nation, that allowed them to see any port on the pres router.

The 9Mbs feeds may have been replaced with Raman 270Mbs feeds now - but I suspect there is still a clean feed channel for each nation available.

Don't know if they take clean trails or not. One of the advantages of the permanent box was that you could just superimpose a national variant over the top.