For some reason, I remember that in the early 1970s, when stations were experiencing technical difficulties, the station played “Age of Aquarius” - does anyone else remember this, or was just a local thing (or something I imagined)?
In the early 80’s I was doing master control for a TV station in Green Bay WI. Major lightning storm came thru, transmitter site was a direct hit. It knocked us off the air. I mean, we had NOTHING!
I got a phone call in master control from our brand spanky new fresh out of college Operations Manager. He wanted to know why we didn’t up up a “trouble” slide or play a “trouble” audio cart. I explained to him that we were ‘OFF THE AIR’, meaning that nothing can be done until the transmitter is back up.
So he yelled at me to “do something”. I grabbed the audio “trouble” cart, cranked up the monitor loud enough so bozo could hear it over the phone, played it several times. We were still off the air but I made it sound like I was doing something and it made the bozo happy.
The college whiz kid never got what part of “off the air” really means.
Did US TV stations have, in the early days or later, an in-vision (and usually glamorously-dressed) announcer/host(ess) to introduce the programmes and cope with technical breaks? It was certainly a thing from the earliest days in the UK and in Europe (in France, the “speakerines” became stars in their own right, and no doubt elsewhere as well).
Not to my recollection (which goes back to 1950 or thereabouts when my parents got our first television). Program(me)s weren’t introduced, and when “technical difficulties” occurred a test pattern would appear, accompanied by a resonant male voice intoning something along the lines of “we now return you to our studio for a brief interlude of recorded music.”
I’ve seen a B&W movie where the Radio Star faints and refuses to go on (faked by her for some plot reason). The technical-difficulties musician, who is supposed to provide the music when the main program goes off air, has a panic attack, drops his sheet music, etc. – he’s never actually had to go on air before.
Which reminds me of the remark by a famous Australian entertainer, about being offered work in London, after doing auditions for a while: his first internal reaction was "??? I don’t do < work >, I do auditions 
"
we had a big TV tower that went down due to ice . they got back on the air next day with a different tower. The new tower has heaters to prevent that.
Also at a local non profit radio station the engineer built the transmitter himself. FCC had to approve it so he sent in pictures and schematics. That was 40 years ago so I assume they have a different transmitter now.
Which one?
When my brother first got out of high school in the early 1980’s he went to MATC for telecasting. Even though he did some camera work at a local station he never finished the degree. He didn’t know the origin of having an Indian on the test pattern.
WFRV Ch 5
Ah. I have family in that area so I am well acquainted with GB tv stations.
“And now for something completely different…”
“It’s”
I remember as a kid in the 60’s when the station was off the air for technical problems, a cute cartoon graphic of a big camera with parts flying off and a guy with his head inside trying to fix it.
“And now for something completely different…”
Indeed. And the concept is still sufficiently within living memory for people to see the point of this:
My favorite technical difficulties cards have always been the ones from the Simpsons:
One of my local stations would show an image of a camera man standing by his camera scratching his head while the camera was unplugged from the power outlet on the wall.
Back in the day (70s kid in metro NY) heard the announcer come on for a voiceover atop the “technical difficulties” slate to talk about “gremlins in the system.” This was usually WWOR, which seemed like the lowest-rent local VHF outlet and failed most often.
Even when it’s controlled by computers, for OTT live broadcasts we still have to plan for handling an interruption - I was just in a meeting about it the other day.
Wow, that’s a great quote. I too like curling.
Flooding in Chicago’s tallest building knocked out a bunch of television (& radio) transmitters last May. The whole building lost power and it hosts a lot of broadcast tenants.
The BBC just played the Test Card (which varied somewhat over the years) and music.
Sometimes with some jazzy music, too