This evening’s planned 30-minute edition of Sportsday ended after fifteen minutes due to technical problems.
Eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed a lack of BBC Sport on-screen graphics (though the standard BBC News flipper was present).
But things went more noticeably awry after a two-way with Hywel Griffith in Doha, when presenter Hugh Ferris was left reading one story after another to camera.
When a video report failed to materialise, Hugh apologised: “You can tell we’ve been having some problems with the pictures here at Sportsday at the moment.
“So I’ll just continue to tell you some of the other sports news that we’ve had today at the BBC Sports Centre.”
Eventually, the programme team through in the towel.
Hugh told viewers: “That in the trade is called a bit of vamping. And I will end it now to put us all out of our misery. But thank you very much indeed.
“All sorts of problems here with all of our pictures. So that you don’t have to put up with me any more, let’s hand you to Matt Taylor who has got the weather.”
And so at 7.45pm we had a pre-recoded weather bulletin from Matt Taylor. That was followed by an unscheduled repeat of yesterday’s edition of Newswatch.
Just before 8pm, Newswatch was faded out, as we moved into a brief countdown sequence taking us up to the top of the hour, when live news programming resumed.
Acknowledgements
PICTURED: Sportsday with Hugh Ferris. COPYRIGHT: BBC.
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