Broadcast continuity

The alarms at the BBC's offices at MediaCityUK keep detecting fires that just aren't there. It seemed to start in 10 January, with this interruption to the late night Tony Livesey show.



Then on 22 February, it happened to Tony again, and another little bit of the Bacon/Palin interview kicked in. The next morning, Nicky Campbell's phone-in fell victim to another false fire alarm; Bacon/Palin was still the trusted standby. This time Radio Manchester went off air as well. Both were back in under ten minutes.

Today, it was Football Focus on BBC1 that had to go to a standby tape, as Dan Walker, Lawro and Martin Keown shuffled off the set built within the BBC building.



I've no real insight as to what's going wrong. The BBC has a penchant for very sophisticated "early warning" alarms, that attempt to detect smoke by regularly sampling air, and shining lasers through it for particles that shouldn't be there. One operative has tweeted that one of the earlier false alarms was caused by a "Raman laser pulsing problem".  Google provides no clues to what this really means - so it maybe from the Bumper Handbook of Baffling But Credible Sounding System Failure Excuses from your building maintenance team, now clearly well-thumbed at Salford Quays. These are issued in rotation to get programme makers off their backs while they try to find out what really happened.

I will predict, however, that the next time it happens on Five Live, you won't here Michael Palin.