Talk:The Armageddon Factor (TV story)

Contradictory info regarding original-broadcast transmission interruption?
The article contains what appear to be contradictory claims regarding the duration of the transmission fault which occurred during the original BBC airing of Part Five of this story. The Story Notes section contains the following description of the event. (All emphasis mine, in both quoted texts below.) Twenty-three minutes into transmission of Part Five, a technical fault on the playback equipment – which occurred at the point where the Doctor is being escorted to the TARDIS by the Mute and the Shadow makes to remove his control device from Princess Astra, saying "Now, Princess, your work is done. Your destiny is at-" – resulted in the programme going off the air for twenty seconds. BBC continuity apologised to viewers for the breakdown in transmission, displaying a TEMPORARY FAULT caption slide and playing music, "Gotcha" by Tom Scott (better known as the theme music to Starsky and Hutch), until the fault was rectified. When transmission was restarted, the 625 line PAL Colour Videotape had been slightly rewound so that there was a repeat of the action immediately prior to the break, with the Shadow's line finally completed as "Your destiny is at hand." However, later on in the DVD releases section, the last item in the content listing for Disc Two of the 2009 version tells it differently. Easter egg: On disc two, click right on continuities to find this Easter Egg. On 17 February 1979, as 8.6 million watched Part Five of The Armageddon Factor near its climax…a break in transmission which lasted several minutes. Presumably derived from an off-air video recording, this is a presumably cut-down (1:26) reproduction of it, complete with apologetic continuity announcer and temporary music. ...Did the outage last "twenty seconds", as the first description claims, or "several minutes" as the second indicates? (If the easter egg is a reproduction of the outage, then perhaps its 1:26 runtime is not "cut down" at all, and the 20-second claim is the correct one?) FeRDNYC ☎  18:52, September 15, 2013 (UTC)


 * The clip on the DVD is pretty much how I remember it from the original transmission.165.225.76.164talk to me 10:37, June 15, 2018 (UTC)