The Show Must Go On

Yeah, I think it was Steve Rider. The bombing took place at 1.20am local (6.20am UK time) when the BBC's overnight coverage had ended. Steve Rider came on air with Olympic Breakfast half an hour early ISTR, at 7.30am.

Speaking of sports programmes turning into breaking news programmes, one other very tragic example was Grandstand on the day of the Hillsborough Disaster, and then Match of the Day later the same evening when Des Lynam had the sombre job of reflecting on the days events. There are plenty of clips on YouTube.

The major fault at Black Hill, which was 1994 I think, was when there was work going on at either an opencast mine, quarry, or building site, and an electricity pylon, whose cables fed Blackhill, fell over into the hole, bringing down the cables. Mum and dad were watching tv at the time, and there was a flicker on both BBC1 and 2, before the flicker ended and the channels were fine. But STv and Channel 4 were taken off air, until about 6pm.

When STV did get back on air, their first footage that I remember was their stock of helicopter shots of scenes of scotland with their thistle logo of the time. They then went on with a reduced Scotland today at 620pm, then showed I think Home and Away, before another reduced bulletin later on. Needless to say, the electricity failure was the big story that day.

It was NBC - they being the US rights holder.

A good example of the show must go on that I can think of comes from my neck of the woods.
Much like the Scotland Tonight example on the last page, but when it happens on your very first broadcast like it happened with Central South, it must have been very embarrassing.
And infamously this was banned from appearing on It'll Be Alright on the Night at the time (despite what Wesley says) because Central were so humiliated by this.



Of course Central didn't have a good reputation for getting it's new news services off to a good start. In 1982 it's new East Midlands opt started with Anne Diamond and Nick Owen sat in a dark studio broadcast to a few people in the newsroom because of the unions. The East opt didn't start until several months later.

During an episode of ABC Television's Armchair Theatre in the late 1950s, back in the days when TV drama used to be live, one of the actors keeled over and died just before he was supposed to be in a scene. They went to a commercial break while the director went down to the studio to reorganise the actors and change the script to work around the loss of the character, the production assistant (Verity Lambert, who went on to be the first producer of Doctor Who) took over the controls in the gallery and they somehow finished the play.

around 18 months later

Ah yes, this was at the ex Capitol Cinema in Didsbury wasn't it? The building later became a theatre - I did a show there and there were all sorts of silly rumours about ghosts as a result of this incident. Nice to finally read some more detail though!

They knocked the theatre down about 15 years ago and there are now some faceless flats on the site.

Des would have done it - the Grand National was the only day of the year those days when Des did Final Score.

Paul Lavers had a lot of experience doing that sort of thing in the early days of Cambridge RedTV, when the presenter would also self op the cameras, graphics etc.

And if you want a preview of what that looks like, the TOTP2 Status Quo special from last weekend took the video of Living On An Island from the Powell-fronted programme, including Powell's out-of-vision introduction. That strike in 1979 also featured a fascinating-sounding episode of Blue Peter, as mentioned in Blue Peter Inside The Archive, where the continuity announcer linked together the films they were going to be showing that day, and a standby film, which seems a bit too much of an effort. During that industrial action in November 1979, though, the unions did allow one episode of Blue Peter to go ahead as planned, while everything else was abandoned, because they were launching the appeal that day. One of the BBC Old Boys websites also refers to an episode of Crackerjack being mounted, but not filmed, because the audience had already turned up and they thought it was unfair to send them straight home without seeing anything.

The strike in September 1980, which saw two episodes of Blue Peter being broadcast from a completely empty studio, also saw this minimalist episode of Top of the Pops...



There is actually footage too of Saturday SuperStore setting up shop on the Play School set. Ignore the brief clip from The Saturday Show...



Note the bit two and a half minutes in or so where Noel turns up for some reason. I wonder why.

Thanks both for filling the gaps in my unreliable memory!

I know the transmitter network is all Arqiva these days, but in those days would it have been Crown Castle and NTL with entirely seperate equipment (and generators) feeding different antennas on the mast? I can quite easily imagine one or t'other not being able to get their power up and running straight away, though it doesn't really explain why Scotland Today didn't go ahead. Perhaps they thought they weren't going to make it on air so popped down to the pub?

I believe STV was off until past 7pm as I remember I was not able to watch Scotland today that day, of course I could have swithced channels thing its not coming back.

Mind you I wonder how BBC stayed on.