For years after I worked in radio, I occasionally had a recurring nightmare - I was alone in the studio where nothing worked. Not the computers, the music, the turntables, the mics, the cart machines, the board - nothing. All you could hear from the speakers was the hum of carrier current and dead air, without anything to fill that awful silence. That's usually when I woke up.

Part of that bad dream came true for one BBC host this week, after his computer that stored all the music suddenly and mysteriously died in the middle of a song. It was so bad, he didn't even know if it was just internal and listeners could still hear the music or if it was going on air that way. 

He was forced to ask them to call and report if they heard, well, nothing. And that's when his fellow staffers came to his rescue. Sort of. Someone came in with a box of CDs, which the host struggled to get into the machine and bring up on the board. 

"He joked that the Radio 2 team was “running down to the basement to get some cassettes and some MiniDiscs” to keep the music going."

Radio 2 system malfunctions leaving Vernon Kay scrambling to play CDs in on-air chaos