SNL, season 2, Ralph Nader’s cold opening. He had an airbag that was supposed to inflate, but it got bungled. These things happen on live TV.
This was also intentional, but a local rock station was changing over to oldies and played several different versions of ‘Louie Louie’ in the 24 hours before the switch.
Oh, man. A local rock station did something similar. They were bought out and replaced by a Spanish station, and their last day they played Wall of Voodoo’s Mexican Radio non-stop.
It’s kinda like football, only they never left the huddle. And a penis was involved.
The 4th season premier of The Venture Bros was already a very confusing episode, it featured not only a time jump in narrative from the 3rd season but the events of the episode are not in chronological order. This was made worse when Adult Swim played the second act twice, they made up for it with repeat airings afterward.
Not really a screwup, but a weird thing to see anyway.
Back in the early 1980s I was in Knoxville, TN. A local TV station was doing a transmitter upgrade which meant their broadcast signal was going to be down for a few days but the station would still be “on the air” for cable subscribers.
For whatever reason, they did this right before the mini-series Shogun was to air, which had been very heavily promoted and was fairly highly anticipated.
You can see what is about to happen.
The mini-series starts but the transmitter is still off the air. A bit into the first hour, the station breaks into the broadcast to announce that they are getting hundreds of irate calls from people upset that they can’t watch and so they are going to restart the broadcast when the transmitter comes back on the air.
Around halfway through, the broadcast stops, the station does a sign-on then the broadcast restarts from the beginning.
A bit after that the station broke into the broadcast again to announce that they were now getting hundreds of irate calls from cable subscribers upset that they are having to watch the first hour or so of the episode again. They apologized for that then went back into the broadcast.
Of course everything is now running close to two hours behind schedule so it was close to midnight before the show ended, and this was when VCRs were still relatively rare (and DVRs of course non-existent) so anyone who wanted to watch had to stay up. The station wound up apologizing again on the news the next night.
So yeah, that was weird.
I also saw a TV weather reporter accidentally scramble the initial letters of two words, announcing that “Our weather today is being dominated by a cold Canadian mare’s ass…” then look confused when the rest of the studio disintegrated into laughter and he couldn’t figure out why. There was a very quick commercial break.
It was years ago so it doesn’t matter, but I’ll register that I hope no one was fired over it, assuming it was a single isolated error. It doesn’t make sense, imo, from a business standpoint, to fire almost anyone over almost any single error. There’s no such thing as a person who never makes mistakes, and if the one mistake you make happens to have a large effect, that says nothing about your abilities–it’s pure dumb luck.
If there was a pattern of problems, on the other hand, then I can see a firing as justified.
Same thing happened during a Late Night with David Letterman episode during the late 80’s. Of course that was during a TV technical writer’s strike. The lights over Dave and his guest just faded, faded, faded, and then were gone. Much to Dave’s irritation.
Another 80’s ‘glitch’ was that a Doctor Who series during the Peter Davison era was sent to PBS with only the dialogue - no music, no FX. It was a Dalek episode and it was very clunky without the proper sound effects, etc.
I remember seeing that live! It was Rene Poussant.
The ex and I were channel flipping through the 1988 election results when one of the stations began to show a reporter at a party headquarters. She was just standing there, waiting for instructions, microphone ready, finger in her ear to block out the local noise. They kept that shot for something like 15 minutes, and the poor woman never said a word.