When Things Go Wrong

Don’t the viewers love it. There’s nothing more likely to grab the attention of the audience than a foul-up on air, and it’s always funny in a newsroom as well–so long as it happens to someone else. The natural disasters of television news include computer systems breaking down, and then the editor or presenter wants to know if anyone in the room can use a manual typewriter. Satellite links that worked perfectly in the technical line-up develop mysterious faults while on air. A report might have sound but no pictures, or pictures but no sound, or the right pictures and the wrong sound, or vice versa. Then, of course, there is the electronic prompting device for the news presenter … which is why they have hard copies of the script in front of them.

The human element presents the public with slipping contact lens, wagging fingers at the bottom of the screen, coughs and sneezes, and presenters being caught eating a chocolate bar. A production error on-air can mean that a shot intended of one presenter on Camera One can be replaced by the shot of the other presenter on Camera Two (close-up of other presenter picking his lunch out of his teeth). Even before we are on-air there is plenty to go wrong: scripts written too late to make their deadline, reports which are too long, or too short, and disrupt the planned duration of a programme, videotape delivered by couriers to the wrong address, and taxi drivers taking interviewees to the wrong television company. A camera crew in Paris looking for the offices of the police agency, Interpol, was sent to the premises of the Interpol dry cleaners!

Beware intruders

In this age of direct action and protest about minority rights, some intruders can evade security and chain themselves to a camera at the start of a live broadcast. When this happened during a live news bulletin the main presenter calmly continued as if nothing had happened, while the other presenter muffled the sound of the demonstrator with the seat of his trousers. Not all visitors are human. An American news anchor shared the studio with a wasp. Millions of viewers watched him being stung on the cheek.

Keep calm

The only thing to do when catastrophe strikes is to keep calm. Apologies sometimes seem in order, although one school of thought says it is pointless to draw attention to some minor technical fault that the non-expert viewer would probably not notice. At the other extreme it is foolish to ignore a succession of obvious calamities by pretending they have not happened. Usually the studio control room will come to the rescue with instructions through your earpiece or, in some cases, the emergency telephone on the desk. Quite often the common sense approach is to go on to the next item as soon as possible while the technicalities are sorted out behind the scenes.

But the worst thing presenters can do is to give the impression that it is somehow nothing to do with them and what has gone wrong with the programme is the result of inefficiency elsewhere. That is unforgivable.