Talking Telephone Numbers

IIRC in the last thread, the games that generated the numbers were recorded on the night of the live broadcast (either before or after, I forget which) and were transmitted as part of the following week's episode.

I wonder how Danny Baker would have coped in this situation?

Looks like this is from the pilot.

One thing that I don’t think was clarified when this was last discussed, is what would have been seen in other regions. Would the Carlton style slide have appeared, or would they have been left with the studio output, depending on how quick the region in question was at noticing. Also is it likely they might have returned later as well.

A couple of us have referred to this above, and someone explained what they recall happening on UTV. All regions still got a clean feed in 1995, so they wouldn’t see the Carlton slides. As Carlton were feeding it to the network, they could have killed the feed from Fountain if necessary and fed black to the network (rather than risk everyone seeing the VT recueing etc) but I doubt they had time to do much here. It was up to the regions to stick an apology caption up, which I expect most, of not all regions, did.

Pres (ie Carlton) asked a few times what was going on - was the off air time the same, etc? - and it was their responsibility to feed that info to the regions. But during the cock-up itself, I don’t know if they would have told all the companies when they could rejoin the feed. Maybe the regions stayed in apology mode until they could see the programme appeared to continuing as normal after the second mistake.

It's a brilliant clip, such a shame it was taken down from YouTube. Just gives a great insight into what it takes to bring a live programme to air. Surprising the talkback was recorded though, is that normal?

As to other regions, presumably Carlton were presenting it to the network but had the ability to pull up a slide for their own viewers?

SayIng that, Find a Fortune was made by Granada but their breakdown in August 1999 was announced by Trish Bertram with the following generic slide in YTV-land so who knows!

I think that style of multi-camera music directing is fairly peculiar to the UK - it's fascinating to watch when you can also hear the PA's counts.

Somebody who worked on Pebble Mill took a seminar once when I was in uni, and I asked him why videos exist with gallery talkback and what their purpose was. He said it's done mainly for training purposes as an example of how things are usually done.

For a very long time it was standard to record talkback on your PasB log tape. It was very useful for training, post programme analysis, debriefing of anything that didn’t go to plan and so on. These days presentation don’t like anything non-broadcast on their lines so it doesn’t tend to happen any more.

It’s i think most prevalent in the UK where automation of music events is not the norm. Most camera crews are used to it here and many directors and PAs are very happy with it as a production process and achieve a high standard of production completely manually. It’s known as Bar Counting. UK directors and PAs who can do it are even being used in the US now for high profile music events.

Some more examples:



And from 2’30” Into this clip:

The ITC required ITV to keep a recording of programmes "as transmitted" (As Ofcom does now). I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong but I believe in those days the Left audio track would be the programme as aired and the Right included talkback.

I'm surprised we've got so far without this:

It may have been the practice of a particular station to do that but I don't believe it was an ITC requirement to have the talkback recorded.

I daresay that if the recording was requested it would have been dubbed off without the talkback. But I can see why it would be useful to have it in responding to any complaint or providing evidence that something that went awry was in spite of the correct steps being taken.