‘OUT OF THIS WORLD’ GOOF BY KNBC STAND-IN TECHNICIANS

Thursday’s episode of KNBC’s new syndicated sitcom, “Out of This World,” featured its main character, the daughter of an extraterrestrial, stopping time simply by touching her fingers together. That trick could have come in handy for Channel 4 management personnel who were manning the tape room that evening while the station’s regular technicians continued their 13-week-old strike.

Things started to go wrong, and the managers quickly found out that, at least in the real-life world of behind-the-scenes television, time doesn’t wait for inexperienced, sit-in technicians.

About 10 minutes into Thursday’s 7:30 p.m. program, someone inadvertently rewound the tape and began repeating the first segment of the show. The managers in the control room soon realized they’d goofed and put up a “Please Stand By” slide, along with an announcement that the station was experiencing “technical difficulties.” KNBC then went to black for a few moments and ran a few more commercials, botching some of them as well, before picking up the last part of the program.

“Someone simply made a mistake,” Regina Miyamoto, a KNBC spokesperson, said Friday. “As you know, our technicians (from the National Assn. of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians) are on strike and we have management people filling some of those jobs. Even when we’re not on strike, the technicians have sometimes made mistakes, like repeating the same commercial over again.”

While KNBC blamed the strike for the problem, the union said that the incident was indicative of the station’s inability to function without its regular engineers.