Metropol

This forum has not been posted in for two days. If this were a radio station, the emergency tape would have kicked in by now.

Well you would hope the tape would be playing, but didn't Radio 1 have a problem with theirs when they actually needed it the other year?

I'm not sure when you mean, but was it around Christmas? I seem to remember a pre-record didn't play, and neither did the emergency tape, so someone ran downstairs and put the Arctic Monkeys on.

I do believe I have a recording of that somewhere.

Radio 1 seems to have had a few problems with its emergency tape over the years. I remember the time Chris Evans on Breakfast decided he wanted to hear what was on it, so went silent for a minute and it kicked in. Trouble is, he couldn't get it off.

Then there was the time Nicky Campbell sneakily re-recorded it with a 'Best of Nicky Campbell' show just before he left the station, so a few months down the line when the fire alarm went off, Nicky Campbell was back on again.

Having said that, my voice was heard doing the 'we'll be back with your normal programme' announcements on the emergency tape of a station I used to work for as much as two years after I left.

Spencer For Hire wrote:Radio 1 seems to have had a few problems with its emergency tape over the years. I remember the time Chris Evans on Breakfast decided he wanted to hear what was on it, so went silent for a minute and it kicked in. Trouble is, he couldn't get it off.

Yes, don't they have to run round the corner to Broadcasting House to switch the playout back to Yalding House?

Jovis wrote:

Spencer For Hire wrote:Radio 1 seems to have had a few problems with its emergency tape over the years. I remember the time Chris Evans on Breakfast decided he wanted to hear what was on it, so went silent for a minute and it kicked in. Trouble is, he couldn't get it off.

Yes, don't they have to run round the corner to Broadcasting House to switch the playout back to Yalding House?

I didn't realise that was the reason. Seems a bit of a faff when you consider at most stations, the emergency tape/CD stops automatically as soon as the output resumes from the studio.

I do remember once hearing a local station which should have been broadcasting a networked show. For whatever reason, the audio feed of the network was not there, but the remote commands to fire jingles, adverts, etc. still worked. The result was after a minute of silence, the emergency CD would kick in, only to be cut off a short while later with a local station jingle, then another minute of silence, then the emergency CD right from the beginning again. Quite embarrassing to listen to.

You weren't listening to my former radio station were you? Am sure that happened several times in my early days (ie. before I was in charge!)...

Happened because the playout system had two commands - one to turn on the network commands, one to turn on the network audio. Do one and not the other and, er, well... you heard

If you were at the station I think you were at (guessing from your username), it wasn't that one... but I think it might have been a problem common to many stations in the same group.

Spencer For Hire wrote:I didn't realise that was the reason. Seems a bit of a faff when you consider at most stations, the emergency tape/CD stops automatically as soon as the output resumes from the studio.

I think run round to BH is a bit of an overstatement, I thought it was more like ring London Control Room and ask/grovel to be put back in circuit. Which if you want to do it cleanly you have to get a feed of the emergency tape onto your desk as an outside source, go into circuit and then fade it out - much like a BBC regional TV studio doing a soft opt.

This is why there are two ways of getting the emergency "tape" on air - it can be played in from the studio playout system, which is handy for fire alarms as you just close its fader and go to something else once you're back into the building. Listen to the clip of the time the alarm went off when Moyles was on air, Producer Rachel's instruction to "put it into evacuation and go". That was the second time it had happenned during that show, but the first time had only produced a flashing beacon rather than the alarm sounding audibly in the studio with mics open, and had been covered over quite smoothly. The second evacuation meant that Hey Ya by Outkast was played for a second time during the same programme. ISTR Chris opening the mic whilst attempting to get the emergency "tape" to play, so that it didn't trigger the silence detector.

The silence detector version is the version where it kicks further down the transmission chain from the studio, and the procedure of having to have your studio put back into circuit by control room applies.

Spencer For Hire wrote:If you were at the station I think you were at (guessing from your username), it wasn't that one... but I think it might have been a problem common to many stations in the same group.

Yes - indeed it was. I remember the phone calls at all hours of the night... 'er, your backup tape is on for the fourth time in 15 minutes'.

Those were the days...

Chris Moyles loves the DAT game, there's a fair few clips on his fansite. The one at the end is the fire alarm incident mentioned previously.

http://chrismoyles.net/soundvault/pafil ... le&id=1140
http://chrismoyles.net/soundvault/pafil ... le&id=1681

http://chrismoyles.net/soundvault/pafil ... le&id=1088