Wow. I've heard of screw ups, but what happened on the Daily Debrief political panel discussion on the 1 PM version of Vassy Kapelos' Show on iHeart (CFRB here) Thursday was just insane. The first five minutes consisted of the guest host, Tim Powers, who is obviously not a full time radio person, unable to cope with technical issues.
He did a brief intro and then called on his first guest. A long silence.
He went to his second guest. The same long silence.
Finally, he tried to intro guest #3. That pundit responded he could hear the host, and then he, too, disappeared into the ether.
The befuddled guest host then asked what was going on, asking to take a commercial break to get things sorted. The problem? The show has a very specific network clock and they could not go to a break early. That was followed by about 30 secs. of dead air and in desperation, the board op segued to the theme, which ran uninterrupted for almost 50 secs.
All live on Bell stations across the country! What a mess!
They finally got their act together and the show started five minutes late, by which time it was almost time for the break he'd called for earlier.
I'm not making fun of anyone - I've been there, done that. But boy, when it's in real time, it's cringeworthy.