I was wondering about how cast and crew react to unexpected circumstances during live television broadcasts. Not the occasional wardrobe malfunction or curse word getting through, but real emergencies, or things that go so off course that the only option is to cut to commercial if possible.
I’m thinking of things that turn out to be minor, such as when Marie Osmond fainted on Dancing With The Stars. Quick cut to a commercial, but then the show came back on with Marie herself telling the camera and audience she was okay.
Then, of course, there was Owen Hart’s accident. The accident itself wasn’t shown on T.V. but when the announcers came back on the screen, as scheduled, it was obvious to the fans at home that something had gone really, really wrong. It seemed like no one producing the show had any idea what to do for a few minutes, and we kept getting shots of the audience while the announcers tried to buy time.
The big one that everybody knows about was Budd Dwyer, which went out live on what was a snow day for most of Pennsylvania. It can’t go much more horribly wrong than that. Someone will inevitably argue that it didn’t happen on live TV, but the makers of the documentary I linked to say that it did, and that’s good enough to confirm my memory of it. Rare is the time when you see a newscaster flustered or at a loss for words, but that day they had a hell of a time, even with what was a hell of a scoop.
More interesting is what they did with the footage afterward, but that’s a journalistic ethics story all its own. Most local news programs replayed it (with the usual “juicy stuff coming so don’t miss it” warning), and some played it in its entirety, all the way to where he’s lying on the ground bleeding out.
And I didn’t link to the actual video, feel free to have a look for yourself if you’ve got the stomach.
One that all Brits of a certain age know about is Tommy Cooper’s death form a heart attack on stage in 1984:
The video is on YouTube. I’ve just seen it (for the first time ever, I would have been ten at the time) and I find it more disturbing than I thought I would,mainly due to the continued laughing. I won’t link to it here for that reason, but a search for “tommy cooper live from her majesty’s” at YouTube finds it.
There was the Monday night Football game in the early 1970s that was a blowout and when the TV camera showed one solitary fan, he put up his middle finger. One of the producers had the presence of mind to shout “He’s saying we’re number one” and Don Meredith repeated it.
Ed Sullivan once persuaded lion Tamer Clyde Beatty to perform in a cage with several animals despite Beatty’s fears the small stage would be dangerous. Beatty lost control of the animals, and a nervous Sullivan went into the crowd to introduce celebrities (Walter Brennan and Eddie Arcaro?) while in the background you hear Beattly shooting his blank gun and cracking the whip. Beatty regained control so Ed’s “rilly big shew” didn’t have a man eaten by lions on it.
Andy Kaufman intentionally screwed up a skit on the show Fridays. Some people on the show were aware of the plan, but others were not. It got really weird and really tense.
Charlie Rocket dropped the F bomb on Saturday Night live.
I saw the Ashlee Simpson SNL performance live when it happened. The recorded track that she was lip-syncing to was screwed up and she froze looking off stage and did some sort of impromptu jig while the recorded vocals continued. They put up a SNL screen still and then shortly cut to commercial.
Here’s a video of the New Wave band Human Sexual Response singing “I Wanna Buttfuck” on live TV. At least one person in the crowd is wearing only paint. It goes on for 2 1/2 minutes before they finally get cut off. Granted, it was local only, and apparently at 2 AM, but still.
**Warning: **this is a very concentrated dose of 1980s fashions, please take with a full glass of water.
NYC’s News Channel 4 was covering a shootout in the Bronx. Chuck Scarborough said “Let’s go to the news copter,” looked down at the screen below the news desk and turned white. He looked up and said “Go to commercial.” Sue Simmons looked at him like “WTF”?
Turned out the news helicopter had crashed onto a rooftop. The Channel 7 helicopter flying above it got perect footage of it. Watch as the pilot goes crazy trying now to crash onto the crowded street before.
Of course, the biggest live event has to be the second plane flying into the World Trade Center. ON MSNBC, Katie Couric was talking with the screen behind her when the entire studio just gasped. She said “What?” turned around and looked at the moniter, and if you listen very closely you can hear her say “Oh, fuck!”
The ambulance came and drove away slowly. The announcers had very little information and lots of speculation. I was with my wife’s family and they had the race on and at the time we were trying to speculate right along with them.
When they drove away without the full lights and sirens we said that’s either very good or very bad.
It was very bad.
There’s a lot of stuff from SNL. In addition to the aforementioned Charles Rocket f-bomb, Norm MacDonald did it once as well. (So did a recent cast member whose name I can’t remember, a couple of seasons ago.) There was the Ashlee Simpson lip-syncing debacle, and also there was the time that Sinead O’Connor rather unexpectedly tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II live on the air.
Also, in the second season of the show, Buck Henry was hosting, and during a Samurai skit, John Belushi accidentally sliced Henry’s forehead open with the samurai sword. Henry instinctively turned away from the camera but later said he wished he hadn’t, so that people could have seen him bleeding and known it was really live. He had to wear a bandage on his forehead for the rest of the show.
I was watching the news in Miami once and they showed this woman who had asked Telemundo to do a segment about her daughter’s suicide. They went to the cemetary for this woman to place flowers on the grave and the ex-husband showed up and shot her 12 times at point blank range. The whole thing was shown on the evening news.
I’m not going to link to the video here, but if you google the woman’s name, you can find it, in Spanish. Wiki article.
On the same note, there were two helicopters that crashed into each other here a few years back, while they were covering the same story (about a car chase). So while it was airing the live story (from one of the helicopters about to get into the crash), you could hear the last words of the guy and him screaming right as it cut back to the anchor person. All people on both the choppers died.
If you’re not too weirded out by the morbid, here’s the story Phoenix Helicopter Crash - The ACTUAL Crash - YouTube]([/url) (complete with interruption due to crash).
And here’s what happened. It’s a shot from a third news helicopter who happened to catch the crash on tape: Phoenix Helicopter Crash: Four Killed. - YouTube
I’m not sure this counts as “horribly wrong”, but it is horribly funny. Johnny Carson once had a tomahawk thrower on The Tonight Show–this kind of shows you how talk shows have changed over the years–and the thrower demonstrated how to hit the target. And hit the target he does!
Well, maybe not quite as much as you’d think: the guest was a television actor, starring at the time as Daniel Boone’s “faithful Indian companion”, who got around to showing off his tomahawk-throwing skills after talking about his role du jour.