AS A graphics assistant at the BBC in the 1980s, one of my assignments was a rugby league cup final at Wembley Stadium. 

My modest role was to produce team lists, name captions and other info to be superimposed over the TV pictures. 

I turned up early and managed to find the graphics generator, set up in a dingy storage area under the crowd seating and far from the production team. 

For this programme there was no assistant producer to help me. I was not absolutely confident about how to score rugby league so I thought I had better mention this to the producer. I hoped he might delegate someone to give me a quick rundown on points awarded for tries, conversions etc. 

I could hear the producer through my headphones. He was in the mobile control room parked by the stadium. He sounded awfully busy, telling the camera crew what shots he wanted, so I hesitated to press the button on my microphone to interrupt. A pause in his earnest instructions never came, and now it wasn’t long till the match would start. 

I consulted nearby BBC engineers but they were fretting over their own problems, and anyway they knew nothing about rugby. 

Oh well. I had played rugby at school and we always got three points for a try and two for a conversion. Rugby league’s probably the same, I thought. 

A try was scored. I typed in a 3-0 scoreline, which the producer duly superimposed over the live coverage. It was being broadcast as far away as Australia. 

“The caption’s wrong” someone in the control room shouted and the producer howled like a wounded dog, as if to say “Someone’s ruined my programme”. 

I still have bad dreams about mistakes I made at the BBC. Writing about them here might make conscientious readers more relaxed about embarrassing mistakes they have made. 

I was working on the Six O’clock News when the Thatcher government was battling the miners' union. I accidentally put an extra nought on a graphic showing the number of miners who had returned to work that day, giving the impression that the strike was collapsing. Fortunately the newsreader’s voice did convey the correct number. 

One of my graphic design colleagues once summoned old material from an unrelated programme by mistake, leading to “One Man and His Dog” appearing over footage of Winston Churchill and his wife. 

Another colleague – let’s call him Tompkins – prepared a caption for a Top of the Pops appearance by Grace Jones singing Pull up the Bumper which accidentally read Pull up the Bummer. It wasn’t a hit. 

When Tompkins was assigned to a This Is the Day religious broadcast from a private home, his personal transport arrangements undermined the climax of the show. The prayer which ended the live programme was interrupted by a knock at the front door and a voice calling “Taxi for Tompkins”. 

Although mistakes by 1980s BBC graphics operators were rare, a typing error by Tompkins briefly became famous. He was working on the Last Night of the Proms at the Albert Hall, where his responsibilities included typing subtitles for the national anthem. Instead of God Save the Queen he put God Save the Quoon. Next day The Guardian made the slip into a front page story, with a cartoon. The Radio 4 satirical programme Week Ending included a sketch with the DG humming along to God Save the Quoon and shouting at Tompkins. The audience was in stitches. 

My worst disaster came when I worked in New Zealand. Onto a big screen behind a much-respected TVNZ weather forecaster I had to project the weather maps. Instead of weather maps made for that evening’s forecast, I accidentally projected obsolete weather maps that had been made for the previous evening’s forecast. Thanks to me, confronted by yesterday’s maps, the unfortunate forecaster was forced to give viewers yesterday’s forecast.