Tonight’s playout error on BBC One Scotland is right up there with the most serious we can recall by a BBC Presentation department.
Even the most inexperienced of hospital radio broadcasters know a simple rule – treat every microphone or studio as if it were live. But it’s a rule that’s easy to ignore.
Imagine if something unfortunate or unexpected – however innocent – had happened when The One Show studio was accidentally put to air. A naughty word, a friendly joke at the expense of the floor manager – or something far worse.
Just think of the field day the newspapers would have. Potentially making national headlines.
Then there is the question of the loss of part of the BBC News at Six. That cannot be taken lightly.
Mistakes are an inevitable part of live broadcasting. What is harder to understand is why this error was not corrected far sooner.
The announcer/director on duty should’ve had the option of taking the continuity desk out of circuit and returning to the network feed. Why was that not done more promptly?
It’s not for us to speculate on how the error occurred but it should be taken seriously.
BBC announcer/directors in the nations do a complex job and usually do it very well. Often they don’t get the credit they deserve. But errors like this one risk undermining the reputation of the BBC itself.
Wider context
We understand that Red Bee’s contract to provide playout and media management for BBC TV channels – such as BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, CBeebies and CBBC – expires next year.
Red Bee is responsible for the playout of “network” versions of BBC One and BBC Two. These are broadcast to viewers in England for most of the day.
Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have their own versions of BBC One, which largely take the network schedule but have their own programming at times, and their own continuity for much of the day.
There’s a similar arrangement on BBC Two for Northern Ireland and Wales.
With further cost-cutting measures in the pipeline at the Corporation, there is an opportunity here to bring back in-house vital services such as playout and media management and utilise existing BBC playout centres in Belfast, Glasgow and Cardiff.
Red Bee could play out tailored junctions to each nation and deal with their schedule changes. Such a solution is already in place on “the other side” for UTV and ITV 1 Wales (not to mention each ITV English region).
But we’d argue this could be done more cost-effectively by making use of the BBC’s existing in-house playout operations.
Technological advances mean location is no longer the obstacle it once was. Playout for BBC Parliament for example is managed by the BBC in Belfast.
Whilst Red Bee certainly doesn’t have an entirely clean copybook when it comes to playout errors, blunders such as this evening’s on BBC One Scotland do damage to the reputation of internal playout operations.
And our perception is that BBC Scotland is more error-prone than is desirable.
Hopefully managers at Pacific Quay are trying to establish exactly what happened this evening and will put measures in place to ensure there’s no repetition.
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FEATURE IMAGE:
PICTURED: The One Show studio, broadcast in error on BBC One Scotland. COPYRIGHT: BBC.
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