Dave Mundy
I hope you all witnessed the shambles at the beginning!
Bill Jenkin
This is what went out on the News Channel:
BBC News At 10 20170621 opening shambles
Bill Jenkin
I gather from various Facebook posts that the automation system and backup crashed at 45 seconds to air. They had to run everything manually. Play in from edit suites etc and manually sound and vision mix, which of course they don’t really have the kit or bods to do.
If you were watching on the News Channel you just saw seemingly random bits of footage followed by Huw sitting there twiddling his thumbs for several minutes.
Peter Neill
Bill has it in a nutshell there. I don’t have any more details but, as a couple of my friends were heavily involved, I’m sure they will emerge in the next few hours.
BBC 1 went into breakdown mode, but the News Channel kept studio E on air throughout.
There is no network control equivalent, with each studio putting themselves to line. And with all their systems crashed they could do nothing. Running the packages as backup from an edit suite is standard practice in the regions. They are copied from the play out server to the machine’s hard drive so if the server, or its controlling software should crash the stories can still be played out.
Such a practice was deemed unnecessary at BH as there was said to be enough redundancy (if you’ll pardon the expression) in the system.
This was a major breakdown and if it had happened five minutes earlier they would probably have recovered in time. It also shows why many news programmes prerecord the opening sequence. It gives a minute to sort themselves out.
Mike Giles
But why were "Breaking News" titles used instead of the standard 10 o’clock version?
I was expecting to hear that the delay had been because of a major incident which required an 11th hour rejig of the opening.
Peter Neill
Everything was loaded up manually and my guess is that simply the wrong clip was loaded. They have very similar names and, in the heat of the moment, perhaps the next one in the list was selected.
The official version:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40350006
Pat Heigham
Could it be that the BBC bought the same computer/server system as BA?
Or, more sinister, is there a cyber hacker out there, breaking into the systems and causing outages.
David Denness
Or, did the person who unplugged the BA system invade BBC News and unplug that one too?
Pat Heigham
If there is, and he’s working alphabetically: BA, BBC etc. then what company has BC?
Some way down is British Gas (BG) so let’s see if they have a crash, in time!
Dave Buckley
I emailed my nephew who works for News and asked if he had been on shift at the time.
He replied….
"… Yes, I was there, in advance of a night shift, and in the fall out
afterwards told the engineers what the problem was. I’m one of the only
people who really understand how it all works, cause I’m part of the team
who built the system. Ultimately the automation crashed 45 seconds to 22:00.
A reboot afterwards fixed it…"
He also said that the main and reserve systems shouldn’t have failed at the same time as they are designed to be redundant.
Nick Ware
Shocking. Maybe it’s time to re-invent the potter’s wheel.
Ian Hillson
Maybe it’s time to re-invent the emergency mixer!
Fifty years ago, if this happened, the vision mixer would press a button allowing the selection relays feeding the downstream black edge caption generator to be used for this. We’ve come a long way, putting all our faith in confusers.
Twitter was awash with lots of great comments, such as:
"… I didn’t see the BBC News at Ten this evening. Turns out the rest of the country nearly didn’t either…"
"… I feel for the person who’s on the receiving end of the letter Huw Edwards’ drafting!…"
The incident stuck around for a short while on the News Channel iPlayer feed before being replaced by the sanitised BBC1 version, so allowing many to download it, including Huws at Ten:
https://twitter.com/HuwsAtTen/status/877287695550164996
I would suggest they stick a breakdown apology caption on all news studio walls at NBH – at least then you can point a camera at it.
Peter Neill
There is a "Bash Box" which the director uses to cut, for example, interviews where automation patently is not appropriate.
This is a Facebook comment from someone who was there.
“…I was aware of Huw on the channel and "could" have cut up the emergency loop back up on the news channel. In truth though, we were so busy and yet hopeful of getting back on track, along with making phone calls, explaining to engineers and doms what was wrong, along with changing the studio to manual operation….”
Dave Mundy
Not Only … But Also …that is .. .not only “BBC News at Ten”… but also “Sky News at Six!”
I accidentally caught Murdoch’s news at Six and Simon Cowell was plugging his ‘Help the Grenfell Tower fire victims’ video on ITV when Sky chopped their presenter in mid-word and then their parliamentary reporter has serious mic problems with jumps in level and quality issues, in-between their utterly childish ‘whooshes’ into every-other item! There must be a kindergarten somewhere who would buy the Sky whoosh machine from E-Bay to teach the infants that if two people are talking together it is ‘LIVE’, grown-up UK citizens have had grown-up news on TV long before Rupert’s pathetic American style stuff.
