The show must go on

Bill and Sian prepare to interview Mis-teeq

"It just goes to show you should never work on your birthday," the floor manager told Breakfast's Sian Williams as she ran out of the studio to catch a plane.

Friday (November 28) was indeed Sian's birthday - and her husband and children had planned to whisk her away for the weekend immediately after programme.

But - disaster intervened, in a completely unexpected form.

A massive power cut hit the BBC's main news centre at Television Centre just before 8am this morning.

It knocked out all the computers we use for writing scripts and editing pictures - and instantly took Radio Four's Today programme and Radio Five Live's Breakfast show off air.

Breakfast, however, managed to stay on air throughout - and even ended up broadcasting for an extra 40 minutes, while other news programmes found themselves a new home.

By complete fluke, the Breakfast TV studio is in a different part of Television Centre, where the power was still on - even if the computers weren't working.

So, the programme's producers found themselves rescuing old copies of scripts from the bin - and even writing new ones by hand on dog-eared scraps of paper.

Astonishingly, the programme carried on much as normal - with celebrity guests Mis-teeq and Helen Baxendale appearing just as planned for a chat with Bill and Sian.

Breakfast's editor, Richard Porter says:

"It was one of those moments you dread in live broadcasting - losing nearly all our technical facilities, with more than an hour of the programme to go.

But the Breakfast team responded brilliantly and I hope we were able to give our regular viewers as close to a normal service as was humanly possible."

We still don't know exactly what caused the power cut and subsequent evacuation, which has affected BBC News programmes all morning.

But some of us have a sneaking suspicion it must be linked to Sian's birthday.