http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5001386.stm

This has got to be a first....

Downloaded this last night (God bless UKNova)..... wow. to Eamonn Holmes credit, he and his cohost handled it tremendously well, as all hell broke loose around them....

Could this ever happen here? I've sometimes wondered how this hasn't happened on the morning network shows in their 'plaza's....

Well, there were a few interruptions on some of the live network game shows in the 50s-60s, notably one on WML where somebody walked into the studio and started to deliver a commercial.

Can't think of any out and out protests, tho.

As for the morning shows, aren't the public areas sort of guarded to keep any riffraff out?

(Remembering during the days when J.Fred Muggs wason the Today Show, some guy showed up in a gorilla suit holding a sign reading I'M J FRED MUGGS' LONG-LOST BROTHER." When the camera finally showed him, he quickly flipped it over to read WATCH KING KONG TONITE ON CHANNEL 7.

Back in the days of "Breakfast Time," Tom Bergeron sent an intern over to 30 Rock to try to get a sign on the air saying "WATCH BREAKFAST TIME ON fX." It did get on the air--barely.

And to tie it all in, "Voice of the Balls" (as dubbed by original "Blankety Blank" host Terry Wogan in his other gig as BBC Radio 2 morning newsreader) Alan Deadicoat is also the "Disembodied English Voice" on "Dancing With the Stars."

Terry Wogan isnt Radio 2 news reader in the morning its his show.

I know that. Sorry if it read that way.

Protests tend to be more prominent on news broadcasts.

There was a protest that delayed the opening to the "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather" in the early 1990s. TVParty has a clip of it.

If you wanna go full blown reversal, Rather staged protest on US Open tennis coverage in 1987. He left the studio and CBS was literally stuck with dead air.

On a local level in the Philadelphia market, Larry Kane, the dean of Philadelphia newscasters, wrote of a most interesting protest that occurred during his time with WPVI-TV's Action News in the 1970s in his book "Larry Kane's Philadelphia". I'll have to dig around and find the excerpt, but I believe it involved Channel 6's late great weatherman Jim O' Brien having to beat the crap out of one of the protesters against the old magnetic weather map.

Edit: Found said protest. Here's the small of it. A group called The Gay Raiders interrupted midway through a July 1972 Action News broadcast. Kane recalls that he was reading a story about youth violence and then he heard someone say to him, "Mr. Kane, we demand justice." From there, a grabbing struggle occurred on camera briefly. The director goes to black and to quote Kane from a paragraph in the book:

"Then the real fun began. Jim O'Brien, our weatherman, went into hand-to-hand combat with the protest leader. Sportscaster Joe Pellegrino ran after the other three invaders and pinned one of them against the wall. When the news returned to the airwaves, O'Brien was near the point of severely beating my visitor. Along with the highs and lows, blood appeared on the weather wall, near the state of Illinois. The viewing audience never saw the violence, but it was a heavyweight struggle." (Found on Page 76 of Larry Kane's Philadelphia, published by Temple University Press).