Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/29/temporary-fault-a-surreal.html
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Maybe Paradise to Sulu, but it was a Highly Agitated Mental State to Trump.
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I don’t know why I’m personally embarrassed that the BBC had that music cued up for emergencies.
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How utterly unremarkable.
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It sounds more like they just opened a mic and held a phone up to the BBC 1 switchboard hold music.
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“Temporary Fault” my arse. Someone reversed the polarity! (Or was it crossed streams?)
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A broken (photo) film by 1985?? (based on the appearance of sprocket holes) bosh-flimshaw! there’s got to be a side-band during the dentists’ office music with a calm British accented woman’s voice reading integers to agents in Moscow. (anti-Occam rulez!)
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See I told you it wasn’t true.
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Own up! Who modified the phase variance?
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Has to be a new band name! 
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I think I’ve found my new ringtone.
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That’s bound to happen when you try to play back an NTSC film reel on a PAL projector.
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Oh, come on! They must have used that line a dozen times in Voyager. Every time something went wrong with the ship controls, the engines, the communications…
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Because classic Trek was produced entirely on film, they could telecine it just as they did with movies, sidestepping the problems of NTSC to PAL conversion and getting better image quality as well. I don’t imagine that it was usually done live, though.
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Yeah I know, but it still makes a great band name.
Though, on reflection, it’s probably spelt Fay’s Variants.
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There exists a special class of music that is exactly interesting enough to buoy you up emotionally when fearing you may not see the rest of your show or sporting event, but not interesting enough that you are disappointed when regular programming resumes. The CBC in Canada excels in producing or identifying this music
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What strikes me the most about this clip is that someone thought enough of it to preserve it for thirty five years. The rest of us have no idea where video of births, graduation, weddings, and other significant aspects of their lives have gone
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While I can’t claim any real knowledge of how things were done back then, my understanding is that they did, in fact, do the telecine live most of the time for shows which were shot on film. Videotape was expensive, I guess - up until 1978 the Beeb saved money by taping over the original broadcast copies of old episodes, unfortunately for science-fiction fans.
Plus, you get somewhat higher picture quality by avoiding the generational loss of recording to tape.
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Sigh. And to think I took several boxes of home-recorded-off-air VHS tapes, from the mid '80s onwards, to the dump only 3 or 4 yeas ago. But life’s too short to check what was on them.
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