I remember seeing that as a kid. I was rolling on the floor laughing. Of course, it may have happened more than once in different fights.
My childhood local news station, WNEP was forever losing power after snowstorms or brownouts and had to broadcast the local news from its parking lot. It must have happened dozens of times. For the sports news someone would write the sports scores on big sheets of paperboard and the sportscaster would hold them up to the camera. I have a suspicion that at times they could have broadcast indoors, but they had a lot of fun doing the news from the parking lot. WNEP also had a habit of throwing the wrong audio tape into its teaser ads–“Coming up on the evening…no the midday newscast…nope, cut (laughter)”.
Chris Morris, later of Brass Eye, made his break by wrongly announcing on the radio that the Queen Mother had died. Later, obviously, it was clear that his “mistake” was fully intentional and typically of his comedy schtick. Morris was kind of like an internet troll brought to life.
The glitch that probably pissed me off the most was Fox Sports’ broadcast of the Formula 1 1999 European Grand Prix. Fox Sports ran same day tape delay coverage of F1 back then, the channel Speedvision showed the races live but it wasn’t available on my cable system. I used to studiously avoid the Internet to avoid being spoiled.
The race was a real interesting one (as F1 races go) with mixed wet/dry conditions. Mid race the feed cut out and I believe they ran commercials for awhile. When they got that sorted out, instead of rejoining the coverage with the race still going, they jumped ahead to the podium ceremony, spoiling the results of the race. They then went back to showing the race again and I got to see how Johnny Herbert gave the Stewart team its one and only F1 victory ever.
Fuck Off! Fuck Off! Twat! You dickhead! You fucking cheat!
John Aldridge loses it when the officials refuse to let him on the pitch as a substitute despite the playing he was replacing being already off the field.
There was some of that yesterday during a sideline scuffle at the Giants-Packers game. The networks had their cameras pointed at the sidelines with the sound on. And you could hear one person yelling at somebody to get their ass off the sideline and another person yelling about it being the fucking playoffs. The network quickly switched the sound over to the booth.
IIRC during the Great Papal Deathwatch of '05 Pope John Paul II’s death was prematuraly announced a couple different times, on different networks. I remember seeing a female reporter on CNN getting hysterical and breaking out in tears before the camera cut away to footage of the Vatican, then back to the studio with a different reporter.
Didn’t an Australian TV network accidently air a report that the Queen Mother had died in the 1990s? I recall the president ended up having to personally apologize to Her Majesty.
One time I was watching an episode of Dead Zone and they played the same segment twice. Due to the nature of the show (main character has flashes of the future) it took me a few minutes to realize this was actually a screwup.
Back when WWF’s Raw used to be taped several weeks a month (even though they always try to act like it’s live), I remember an episode where in the middle of a segment someone must’ve hit rewind on the tape machines because suddenly everything went backwards for a few minutes.
There was the Frank Reynolds outburst in 1981 over erroneous reports that Jim Brady and Ronald Reagan had died.Frank Reynolds - Wikipedia
I can’t remember the exact year but in the late 1980s NBC in New York City had shown the Yankees the maximum amount they could before the season ended. The last weekend with the Yankees still in the pennant race, they couldn’t broadcast the game. They had to show a video tape of the 1986 “Bill Buckner” world series game.
I recall a John Belushi-era ep where he was in a disco-but at the end of the sketch the disco vanished from around him, which at the time weirded me out (I later learned what a green screen is).
Not one of the worst, but one of the funniest: I remember back in the '60s, waiting for my favorite game show to come on. The familiar message, “We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by,” was on for a particularly long time, several minutes at least. Finally, the problem was cleared up, and the announcer came on with his familiar opening line, “Hello, we’ve been waiting for you! It’s time to play Truth or Consequences!”
There used to be a science magazine programme on BBC called Tomorrow’s World - it was famous for its technical failures - broadcast live, the show dealt mostly with up-and coming technologies and inventions, so they would often be demonstrating flaky prototypes - and they would very often go completely wrong, leaving the presenter to flounder and say things like “well, if this had worked, you would have seen…”
The only specific one I can remember was a prototype for instantaneous language translation (basically speech recognition chained to a language parser and translator, chained to a speech synthesiser) - it failed in such a way as to produce an amusing babble of nonsensical words. IIRC, they drafted in a tame foreigner to verify the output - and tried to use the device to ask him if he’d had a pleasant journey, but the machine asked him something about a leather belt instead.
Didn’t some cable network ‘accidentally’ show a few minutes of a porno flick on the Disney channel a few years back? I remember reading about it in the paper, but Google isn’t helping. That’s gotta be the worst.
Why would the president of the USA apologize for something an Australian television network did?
I suppose he could have meant the President of Australia, were there such an animal.
This very night (I assume just on my local affiliate) the first seven minutes of 2 Broke Girls had no sound except for the laugh track and the musical stingers between scenes. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen (while watching 2 Broke Girls).
A recent PBS special about Mike Douglas had every last shot showing the boom mike. Yeah, when he was in Cleveland that was to be expected, but it was after he went national.
I remember a wrestling program (I want to say one of the WWF ones) that aired the wrong promo for an upcoming event. There was a big pay per view special that night, and the promo was for the next pay per view, and gave away some of the results for that nights matches. This was back when kayfabe was a really big deal.
Also, an episode of Letterman’s stupid pet tricks featured this woman with a huge bird, which shat on her lap. The camera quickly cut back to Dave, and someone off camera must’ve quickly cleaned it up. Pan back to bird woman sans birdshit.
That’s not a technical screw-up. Current TVs have virtually no “overscan”, showing the full image captured by the camera. But back in Mike Douglas’ day, televisions had roughly 10% to 20% over-scan. The Sony broadcast monitor sitting here on my desk has an “under scan” button that allows the viewer to see the top, bottom and sides of the image instead of the regular over-scaned image. Cameras of the time, and even pro cameras today have markers to show the “safe” area to use that will show up on every TV ever manufactured.
So the boom operator got as close as possible to get good audio, and monitored the position of the boom on a regular, minimally over-scanned monitor. If the boom showed up on a professional monitor set to underscan, so what? That wasn’t what viewers at home were watching. And TV engineers of the time couldn’t expect that someday people would be watching sets with no overscan. And the folks putting the PBS special together had two choices - show the boom, or cut off 20% of the image of the top - and a cosponsoring amount at the bottom and sides to avoid excessive space at the bottom.
The Late Late Show (Craig Ferguson) on CBS? had their lights go out in the middle of the show. Complete black. They came on then went out again and the end of the show was the host holding a flashlight in order to sign off.
I remember hearing about the Heidi incident years later from people who were still outraged.
