• Channel 5 Christmas Hot-Mic Incident

    From Tavis Ormandy@taviso@gmail.com to uk.media.tv.misc on Tue Aug 11 22:51:29 2026
    From Newsgroup: uk.media.tv.misc

    In the early 2000s, I was watching terrestrial TV late on Christmas
    night, it might have been past midnight. I'm pretty sure it was Channel
    5.

    There was a really bizarre hot-mic incident, it lasted about 10 minutes.
    There was nobody on screen, you could only hear a male voice and only
    one side of the conversation. The man had clearly been told there was
    some major newsworthy event happening (maybe a riot or something), and
    that he may have to interrupt programming with an announcement. He was
    was getting really frustrated he wasn't getting any more details and
    that he couldn't get confirmation.

    A few minutes later he must have realized, and it went away. I kept
    watching, but there was no interruption.

    Does anybody else remember it or know what happened? I was reminded of
    it recently but can't find anything about it online.

    It always stuck with me, you didn't used to see such crazy mistakes on terrestrial TV, and he was clearly angry and used some really bad
    language (I dont remember what exactly, but I remember thinking ofcom is
    going to fine them or something).

    Tavis.
    --
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