wireman2004 wrote:2. What happens when you have too go into evacuation mode. effectively what happened too vernon a couple of months ago... Dhow do you go about that?
I'm sure Aled will correct this, but as I understand it there are two ways that the emergency "tape" gets on air. If it's a fire alarm rather than a technical issue, the studio that's on air plays it before everyone heads for the doors. If you look in the sound vault this happened while Chris was on air (Juliet's last day as I recall)... Twice. So we got Outkast twice.
The other way of it getting played is if a silence detector in Broadcasting House kicks in because the Radio 1 output has gone quiet indicating a fault. This is what happened with Vernon, when Yalding House suddenly found itself without power. To get a studio (are Radio 1's studios still officially called Continuities?) back on air in that situation you need to get London Control Room in Broadcasting House to switch the studio to air, but to do it cleanly you get LCR to provide a feed of the emergency tape to the studio you're picking up from - Vernon went to Western House, home of Radio 2 on that occasion. Fade up the emergency tape, LCR switch your studio into the distribution, you fade out the emergency tape and carry on.
Incidentally I believe the Radio 4 incident Aled mentioned was down to finger trouble in LCR - they were trying to put a feed from BBC Manchester onto 6 Music (for Marc Riley's show, which had started off routed through one of the Western House studios but then gets switched directly to line to free up the studio) but * up and put it onto Radio 4's distribution.