Everton fans, Jimmy Carter feels your pain

The tragic miss of the only goal in the Everton-Liverpool match by ITV Sport seems to have been down to engineers failing to throw a manual override to stop the ads going out automatically.

Only in the region where the game was actually being played does the engineer actually seem to have been watching what was an intensely boring game. The rest could have been forgiven for falling asleep.

But it does put me in mind of another manual override in which I was involved. In 1977, as a cub reporter, I was sent down to Lancaster House to cover a visit by then President Jimmy Carter. It was a “cameras only” event, so I disguised myself as another of the above engineers and got in.

We had a rare live link into the teatime news on ITV. At 30 seconds to the end of the news Carter came out and I shouted from across the ground outside “Mr President, we are live on British television news,” whereupon, rather improbably, he and then premier, Jim Callaghan, strode toward my microphone and camera.

I managed my first question just as the engineers should have allowed the regions to pick up at 6.00pm with their regional news. All but Yorkshire threw the manual override. The interview lasted 10 minutes.

When I got back to the studio the champagne was flowing and the switchboard was jammed with viewers complaining that the interview with the president had been summarily cut off.

But amongst the excitement, the phone rang. It was Channel TV on the Channel Islands, saying that the 10-minute overrun had been a disgrace, that it had trashed their entire automated viewing schedule for that night, and that if it was ever to happen again I should be fired.