I hope nobody was watching yesterday afternoon’s emergency collection of “King of the Hill” reruns on Fox 11 in Los Angeles with their fancy new plasma TV, since the “RAINOUT” graphic that was continuously in the upper right-hand corner would have been burned in forever.
When I had the world’s most informal internship at independent station WTMV in Tampa in the summer of 1992 (they’ve since changed their call letters twice and started using Popeye’s parrot as a mascot), they carried games from three of the teams that then had spring training in the Tampa Bay area: the Cardinals, the Reds, and the Blue Jays. The agreed-upon broadcasting technique for a rain delay/rainout is that the announcers will fill exactly 10 minutes at the scheduled start time before returning control to the affiliates. WTMV’s second- and third-hand equipment was horrible enough that it would be problematic and awkward for them to backtime a half-hour show and join it in progress at the 10-minute mark, so instead, they had a 20-minute tape of baseball-related music videos that they probably got free from Major League Baseball to carry them to the next half-hour. Then they could start filling time with whatever sitcoms were lying around the control room, which usually meant reruns of “The Munsters Today.”
Original comments…
thatbob: Huh, so that’s how the sausage gets made.