Everton fans, Jimmy Carter feels your pain
The tragic miss of the only goal in the Everton-Liverpool match by ITV Sport seems to have been down to engineers failing to throw a manual override to stop the ads going out automatically.
Only in the region where the game was actually being played does the engineer actually seem to have been watching what was an intensely boring game. The rest could have been forgiven for falling asleep.
But it does put me in mind of another manual override in which I was involved. In 1977, as a cub reporter, I was sent down to Lancaster House to cover a visit by then President Jimmy Carter. It was a “cameras only” event, so I disguised myself as another of the above engineers and got in.
We had a rare live link into the teatime news on ITV. At 30 seconds to the end of the news Carter came out and I shouted from across the ground outside “Mr President, we are live on British television news,” whereupon, rather improbably, he and then premier, Jim Callaghan, strode toward my microphone and camera.
I managed my first question just as the engineers should have allowed the regions to pick up at 6.00pm with their regional news. All but Yorkshire threw the manual override. The interview lasted 10 minutes.
When I got back to the studio the champagne was flowing and the switchboard was jammed with viewers complaining that the interview with the president had been summarily cut off.
But amongst the excitement, the phone rang. It was Channel TV on the Channel Islands, saying that the 10-minute overrun had been a disgrace, that it had trashed their entire automated viewing schedule for that night, and that if it was ever to happen again I should be fired.
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Hurrah! But Aargh! Where’s the ten-minute interview? Don’t tell me that ITN’s video recorders took the regional news instead?!
Jock out.
Thanks for the link, Jon. Don’t know if you’re an avid Off The Post reader or if you stumbled across us through Google, but it’s appreciated all the same.
Jon: Thanks for the link to the story and context of the information….
Amazing stuff Jon – this should be one of the first lessons they teach reporters. Be sneaky!
Hello Jon,
I thought your having Chutzpah might describe you in this action but it doesn’t fit. I’ve copied and pasted the definition of chutzpah from the dictionary onboard my Mac iBook G4 below. Enterprising might be a better word. This may describe how you have conducted yourself over the years. If my calculations are right you were 28 in 1977. (2009 – 1977 = 32 .
60 – 32 = 28.
The picture quality in the snippet is great.
chutzpah |ˈhoŏtspə; ˈ kh oŏtspə; -spä| (also chutzpa or hutzpah or hutzpa)
noun informal
shameless audacity; impudence.
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: Yiddish, from Aramaic ḥu ṣpā.
enterprising |ˈentərˌprīzi ng |
adjective
having or showing initiative and resourcefulness : some enterprising teachers have started their own recycling programs.
DERIVATIVES
enterprisingly adverb