TV-AM 1987 Storm + Backup

This came up in part before (can't find the original thread at the moment) but poking around on YouTube, there's what looks like a studio recording of the TV-AM output from the morning after the Great Storm of 1987:



Because of the burnt-in time clock, one knows the video ends at just after 8:15am, and the description says that the recording ends where it does because of a power cut.

This presumably implies that either TV-AM fell off the air altogether or whatever generators or backup power supplies or whatever they use kept the service going but couldn't power the equipment for the studio recording.

I suppose to cut a long story short: In the TV-AM days, if TV-AM couldn't transmit for whatever reason or fell off the air, bearing in mind Breakfast on ITV at that time was nationwide and Central/Granada/Yorkshire wouldn't be wired to the transmitters at 8:15am, what theoretically could happen at this point to get something, anything, back on air?

Can anybody remember if TV-AM fell off the air in 1987?

I think it did, but they left Richard Keys at Thames in case of that eventuality. The theory when this was discussed previously was that they routed the Camden Lock output via Thames so that they could take over quickly if needed.

About 8ish, they did hand back to the TV-am studios and Gordon Honeycomb read the news, and then Anne Diamond presented from the TV-am studio. As you say Steve, they left Richard Keys at Euston Road in case of any more problems.

Presumably, if TV-am simply couldn't get something to the transmitters, this slide or something similar would have appeared until 9:25:
http://thetvroom.com/images/pool-z/z-011/main-000-311.jpg

The regional stations had no right to be on air before then under any circumstances, as I understand it.

I believe Richard Keys took back over at Thames when TV-am's power fell off once again. Camden was routed via Euston Road for the morning, so in theory the IBA would have fed Thames to all transmitters.

Did Thames actually put anything out that day given it's strongly hinted Crystal Palace was off?

To answer the second question, I am guessing there was an agreement with Thames in place for disaster recovery. The priority would have been to make sure the rest of the country got a programme so advertising revenue could still be earned.

I lived near Crystal Palace in 1987 and the power was most definitely off until the afternoon.

The British Telecom lines were a lot harder to switch around back then - from 6-925 each transmitter was routed directly to TV-am via the telephone exchanges. It wasn't a simple matter to quickly rewire them to the regional ITV centres out of the allotted hours.

Wonder how it was achieved then?

Feeding Thames to the whole network would, I presume, have just required BT Tower to patch the line from Thames into the circuits feeding the rest of the country rather than that from TV-am. Much simpler than putting all of the regional studios back to the transmitters.

(In actual fact it may have been a bit more complicated because TV-am had regional ads to deal with.)

Maybe everyone got Thames ads that morning?

I believe that split ads had been dropped by 1987 due to the difficulty in compiling the breaks and playing them out with the technology of the day.

I read an article once that said the original regional advertising system involved compiling the ads for each region in the 'downtime' of the main VT machines during the afternoon, then playing them all out simultaneously each morning. No betacarts or such.