BBC Left Egg-Faced After Open Mic Blunder

The BBC were left egg-faced by an embarrassing blunder that saw behind the scenes regional audio broadcast live over the national news.

During the last 10 minutes of today's BBC News at One viewers in the North East & Cumbria region heard local news presenter Charlie Charlton, pictured above, and weatherman Peter Grant discussing Twitter, among other things. Grant pointed out that Cumbria were making lots of Tweets in a "political move", whatever that means in BBC parlance. Could he have been referring to the BBC Cumbria Twitter feed, which is certainly a throng of activity?

Grant went on to explain how he couldn't "be arsed" to do something and had very few Twitter followers. Charlton replied that she didn't have a Twitter account and had no interest in starting one. Charlton was then heard shushing Grant so she could read through some last minute script changes before their programme aired less than five minutes later. She was heard asking for some extra printed extracts of the script for "security purposes". Viewers also heard the BBC's Jim Knight testing the audio link for his outside broadcast from the market town of Morpeth.

At the end of the BBC's regional news Charlton apologised for any sound problems during the earlier national news programme.

Edit: The author apologises for incorrectly naming the weatherman as Peter Rowell, when his name is actually Peter Grant. That error has now been corrected. Peter Rowell is a convicted paedophile, who although previously featuring on the BBC payroll has nothing to do with the North East & Cumbria region!