Daytime news at the end?
The 29th of December 2020 will be remembered by generations of television fans. The blockbuster of infotainment, for 750 years affectionately called Tagesschau in the vernacular, which only a few weeks ago led to the official name being registered as such, experienced its most difficult hour so far - or at least quarter of an hour.
At the beginning, the ordinary viewer did not notice anything. The opening credits, each time performed live in the studio by hundreds of extras in a filigree choreography in which the individual small actors hold up panels to the camera and give the impression that it is a computer-generated animation, ran flawlessly. The speaker, whose name escapes me at the moment, kindly told the time (something about seventeen or seventy-eight) and announced the first contribution - which did not come.
A statement from the broadcaster could not be obtained.
Journalists all over the world are left to speculate as to why the wrong programme ran first and then the right one without sound.
Whether it was due to technical problems or underpaid interns who were overwhelmed by the much too modern equipment cannot be answered. But one should not expect too much from a public broadcaster that had just started broadcasting 68 years earlier. This newfangled stuff is still in its infancy.
In the days when ominous boxes of magnetic tape recordings were inserted into huge players, the most that could have happened was someone pouring celery juice over them (as seen in the film Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange) to render them unusable, but that doesn't explain mix-ups and sound drop-outs. Years ago the nation was upset about how it could happen that the colours of the German flag could be mixed up instead of at least showing them upside down, but now something like this.
Broadcast finally cancelled
The desperate system-relevant staff behind the camera were so shaken that the entire programme was cut short and the announcer, whose name I still can't think of, referred to the news programme at 8 p.m., which was then allegedly - according to tradition, no one has checked this - actually broadcast.
Unfortunately, we will never know what information was supposed to be disseminated among the people in the commercial-free time between 5:02 and 5:13 p.m. at the North German Broadcasting Corporation in cooperation with the other state broadcasting corporations, which only have a paltry nine billion euros a year at their disposal to be able to offer such in-house productions without product placements or surreptitious advertising.
Whether anything else could have happened in the world between 5:15 and 8:00 p.m. and that could have been worked out by a presumably active editorial team into a news text and picture material that could be read aloud remains just as questionable as the basic orientation of an advertising-free news programme. For one thing, nothing is more important than the information about which company manufactured the clothes of the presenters' staff and which distributor equipped them, and for another, today's viewers cannot be expected to remain attentive over such a long period of time.
Adapt the concept
Therefore, from now on - for the time being limited to the innovative public broadcasters - an insert 'disturbance' or similarly creative words or sentences will be broadcast for at least 15 minutes every hour instead of supposedly moving pictures (this is only an illusion created by the inertia of the human eye). As with a programme with the unforgotten Hans-Joachim Kuhlenkampff that was too short: the broadcasting Hessischer Rundfunk expected an overdraft as usual and then - instead of, for example, the adorable kittens frolicking in a box-like replica of the station logo - broadcast a test picture. Ingenious.