This morning’s edition of BBC Breakfast was taken off the air a few minutes early due to a fire alarm at the BBC’s studios in MediaCity in Salford.
Presenters Roger Johnson and Rachel Burden were interviewing Harpreet Kaur, the winner of The Apprentice, when the fire alarm went off in the studio.
After a minute or so of confusion, the programme was taken off the air.
BBC One’s presentation team took over quickly, playing out a number of extra trails, to take us up to the next scheduled programme, Saturday Kitchen, at 10am.
Playout centres in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales also jumped in to pad out the unexpected gap in the schedule.
Northern Ireland took the initial seconds of the network junction. We then had a few seconds of the filler animation, usually played out on the clean feed of BBC One between programmes.
Local playout of trails then kicked in – albeit there was an appearance of a network-branded sting, which appeared to be played out locally.
In Scotland, the announcer/director managed to update the playout schedule in time and covered the entire junction locally. However, he suggested in his link announcement for Saturday Kitchen that the programme was starting earlier than billed due to the issues with BBC Breakfast. In fact, Saturday Kitchen started on time.
BBC One Wales covered the entire junction locally without issue.
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