I’ve seen a clip of either The Today Show of Good Morning America (whichever one has the glass window on the street behind the hosts). As they were panning over the crowd in front of the window, one woman lifted her top and flashed the camera. Neither of the hosts speaking noticed a thing, but when they cut to other reporters, the look on her face made it pretty obvious she’d seen what happened.
WCVB in Boston managed to win the Sports Illustrated Heidi Award for boneheaded sports casting two years in a row during the mid-late 80’s. On one occasion, Susan Warnick was covering the Boston Marathon and started having a minor conniption because she couldn’t find Joan Benoit anywhere in the pack of leaders. She then started theorizing on whether Joan had been injured or cramped up. Um, Susan? Not only is Joan not running this year, she’s covering the Marathon for the same frickin’ station you are!
The other year (I can’t remember which came first), WCVB learned the hard way that if you’re going to do live locker room interviews (Red Sox, in this case), don’t set up your camera in front of the shower entrance.
Way back when I worked for an NBC affiliate and Connie Chung was the nightly news anchor, there was a big goof-up on air.
For an over the shoulder graphic shot, the camera is supposed to move so the anchor is framed off center. This leaves room for the graphic. Well, the camera was not positioned correctly and the graphic appeared right over Connie’s face. Then the camera moved very jerkily so that Connie’s face wasn’t even on camera, then they fixed it.
You would think for the West Coast broadcast they would have fixed it, but nope.
As for notorious, I can think of nothing worse than a bright sunny Tuesday in September about four and a half years ago…
There have been several happenings on Saturday Night Live, most of them involving musicians. Sinead O’Conner ripping up a photo of the Pope, Elvis Costello changing songs at the last second, Fear’s fans ripping up the studio.
One episode from the original cast featured Louise Lasser, the guest host, melting down incoherantly. This was the last sketch in the second-to-last ep. from season 1.
SNL can’t be mentioned without that superbomb of Ashlee Simpson’s. You could just hear and see the credibilty just slide right off her while she did that little dance. Beautiful moment!
As a reaction to growing unrest in East Germany and East Germans fleeing via other eastern bloc countries, the government planned lifting the most significant requirements for exit visa, making those a realistic option for the general population. Politbüro member Günter Schabowski announced this at a live press conference. Then a journalist asked when this was to become effective. After a short pause, Schabowski erroneously answered: “To my knowledge, immediately… without delay.” Border guards and other security forces had not been informed yet, but the news spread like wildfire. They were unprepared and unable to control the situation when people stormed the Berlin wall later that evening on 11/9/1989.
This reminds me. Recently, someone got fired for shouting at one of the people behind the glass window on one of these shows, “What the fuck’s your problem?” It was heard live on the air.
That did happen, although I’m not sure if that’s exactly how he phrased it (he did say something about that “little monkey”). Supposedly he occasionally said the same thing about white athletes and meant nothing by it.
Marlon Brando had his weird Oscar to-do where his award was ‘accepted’ by a (fake?) Native American woman.
What about the well-known incident about the weather. The night before a big snowfall was predicted, but didn’t happen. The next night, when the woman newscaster turned the show over to the weatherman, she said “hey where are those 8 inches you promised me last night?”
The pause was deafening and I think there was a bit of a “oh, I can’t believe I just said that” type of reaction…
This one is reported by Allan Sherman in his bizarre and fascinating book The Rape of the APE*. I’ve never encountered it anywhere else.
He says that, when it first started out in the 1950s, a game show (I believe it was What’s My Line?) wasn’t doing so well in the ratings. As a last-ditch effort to boost interest, they brought an elephant on the show. At a climactic moment, they opened the curtains to reveal the elephant, who was busy pooping on the stage. Everyone was in hysterics, and the director was trying to get the cameraman to point to someone who wasn’t laughing. Finally, he settled on the only one who wasn’t - the elephant. The shoe became a big hit.
Sherman’s generally accurate where I can check him, but if that really happened (it doesn’t seem like WML’s format, and I can’;t see whjy you’d want to cut away from laughing people), why hasn’t anyone else reported it?
On the other hand, I know there was a pooping cow on The Red Skelton Show, because I’ve got the footage on one of thse “blooper” tapes. As a matter of fact, the audience was laughing hysterically, andf the camera did stay on the cow (the front end), while Red ad-libbed.
That will always be my first thought about live TV. The second plane hitting has to be the live shot seen by more people and the most surprising shot of all time.
I remember coming back from a commercial break on the CBS news to see Walter Cronkite on the telephone?! On live TV?! When he hung up, he announced the LBJ had just died.
I have a short audio clip that sounds like it came from an old NBC news radio segment. After the opening announcement the anchor is still talking to his co-anchor and he says something to the effect of “I was outside mowing the goddamn lawn. I came in at two o-clock and …” After this there’s a few seconds of silence as he realizes that he’s on the air.
Several years ago I was watching PBA Bowling on ABC. A bomb threat forced an evacuation of the bowling center, so they re-played a game from 1976 in which someone had scored 300 points.
I was watching Washington’s WTTG (channel 5) one night back around 1979 or so when they cut to a news break, only instead of an immaculately coiffed newsreader we got a newsreader frantically making up her face and saying “Am I on? Am I on?” After a couple of seconds of this the screen went dark but the sound stayed live, so we could still hear, “Was I on? Was that live?” Er, yes to both, I’m afraid.
I can’t cite specific examples beyond vouching for the fact that I’ve seen a few of them, but it’s always enlightening and amusing to get to the “on the scene” reporter(s) just before the anchor desk announces their presence at whatever “breaking news” scene they’re covering. They’ll be primping, yelling at the crew, picking their nose, scratching, listening to or watching a rival station’s person-on-the-scene beating them to the scoop, or any number of other embarrassing actions.
If you saw Fahrenheit 911 then surely the image of Wolfowitz licking his comb before going on camera is burned forever into your mind and whatever credibility he may have had before then went right into his scalp. Yecch! I know it’s a movie, but supposedly from archival footage before some “live” event. In any case, disgusting.
Live news is always good for weird stuff. I remember the night that Jessica Savitch had her meltdown during the NBC Newsbreak. And the day Frank Reynolds was reporting on Reagan getting shot and he started yelling at people about getting their facts straight (they had just (mis)reported that James Brady had died). And the day Bernard Shaw let the f-bomb slip - I believe he was quoting someone else. I always wondered if someone ended up getting fired over that one.
I saw this. Ol’ Lou had a serious bout of coughing. He was coughing his head off. Everybody else, kept right on, backup singers and band. What I don’t remember was whether or not Lou joined back in after he recovered.
