Several of the BBC’s flagship news programmes on radio and TV were disrupted this morning when its West London news centre was hit by the double whammy of a power failure and a fire alert. The disruption forced the Today programme off the air for 16 minutes, ironically during an interview with the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. The BBC was forced to play music instead. BBC News 24 had to temporarily broadcast from the BBC1 Breakfast News studio, while BBC World carried recorded material. The disruption also affected Radio 5 Live. All services are now operating normally, but the cause of the problems is being investigated, and the BBC says it cannot rule out further disruption in the course of the day. World Service radio programmes, which come from Bush House in central London, are not affected.
on Nov 28th, 2003 at 18:42
According to tonights 6pm news on Radio 4 its likely to take all of the weekend to repair the fault(s).
Parts of BBC News are still without power and are expected to be down over the weekend - though programmes have returned to normal
One casualty of all this, the re-launch of the BBC News 24 TV service - originally slated for Monday has been shifted by seven days and will now take place on December 8th.
on Nov 29th, 2003 at 11:58
It’s interesting that, while the story about the delayed launch of News 24 is already in the public domain, a certain Web site in the UK is still flagging the story as “exclusive.” And that comment is exclusive to Media Network
on Nov 29th, 2003 at 13:29
Ah yes, I know the site you mean.
Its not the first time they’ve done that - in fact they’re well known for trying to take the credit for others news items …
There is at least one Digital site that deliberately blocks links posted by users of its forums to that specific site because of it.