Presenter forced to improvise after track cuts out because of computer system failure

“Please don’t stop the music,” Rihanna once sang. On Thursday, producers at BBC Radio 2 scrambled to oblige as Vernon Kay was forced to use CDs to play music on the station after its digital system failed.

The radio presenter, 50, was playing Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who towards the end of his show when the issue occurred. At about 11.30am, the track cut out and he came back on air laughing. He said: “This has never happened to me, where the computer system has just failed.”

BBC lacks the hottest takes from Lineker’s Rest Is Football crew while Overlap gang and Christina Unkel boost ITV

It is accepted among TV and film execs that a tertiary element now complicates the relationship between viewer and product. Even auteurs such as Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan have been forced to assimilate grudgingly the reality of phones, tablets and watches pumping out all manner of distraction.

Coverage of Euro 2024 has seen further foxes in the chicken coop of linear TV broadcasting. Going viral on social media is a key target even if neither of the UK broadcasters has yet headed down the route of CBS’s Champions League coverage: less infotainment, more a raucous post-works drinks session. Podcasting, meanwhile, part of the wider football media landscape since Germany 2006, has become a lucrative, fresh and – crucially here – unregulated frontier for pundits.

ITN’s Tom Bradby raised the alarm, but I’m not sure it’s a problem to worry me or David Attenborough. Viewers benefit from diversity behind the desk

Since the last general election, we have gone through three prime ministers, changed monarchs and seen a record number of scandal-fuelled resignations from the cabinet. But at least one thing will remain the same. Tom Bradby will be back to present ITV’s coverage of election night, joined once more by George Osborne and Ed Balls.

There is comfort in familiarity, but maybe not for Bradby and the like. Speaking to the Radio Times about the coverage, he suggested that perhaps, career-wise, he should be nervous as “there aren’t many white male anchors left”.

Leila Latif is a freelance writer and critic

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‘Are you two the best we’ve got?’ It was a harsh question, but it summed up last night’s final leaders debate pretty well

Two cliches hovered over Wednesday night’s TV debate between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak – the first that the stakes were high, the second that Sunak had nothing to lose and Starmer had everything to lose, since he was on course for a victory so resounding that its foundations must be fragile. It’s simply not possible for nearly 50% of the country to agree on one leader, the logic goes, so Sunak’s job was to camp on Starmer’s contradictions, and scare away the undecideds with talk of Labour’s tax burden.

It makes sense on paper, but only in a world in which positive change is so unimaginable that the status quo represents safety and prosperity: all the audience questions suggested that it does not. Whatever their prescription, from closing the borders to making a better contract with young people, whether they were battling benefits sanctions or bankrupt local councils, the audience questioners were pretty unanimous on one point: everything’s broken. So Starmer’s job was to stick that broad-spectrum malaise on his Conservative opponent, and try to make sure none of it seeped out into a more generalised, will-sapping pessimism.

PM again declines to say whether he told Craig Williams in advance about his decision to hold the election in July

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Rishi Sunak is returning to the campaign trail on Thursday, PA reports, after a two-day hiatus for the Emperor and Empress of Japan’s state visit and preparations for the final head-to-head debate with Sir Keir Starmer.

With one week to go until polling day, the deepening gambling scandal is still likely to feature heavily when he faces the media during a tour of the East Midlands and Yorkshire.

He is expected to visit a factory in Derbyshire and hold an evening campaign event in Leeds.

Keir Starmer accused Rishi Sunak of using transgender issues “as a political football to divide people” during their head-to-head debate on Wednesday.