Reading BBC Radio 3 news? There's an App for that...

Here’s an unusual tale: The BBC recently suffered an IT meltdown, with the broadcaster’s computer and telephone network crashing while a newsreader was slithering into her seat to report current affairs for BBC Radio 3.

Newsreader Alison Rooper was forced to act - and persuaded her newsdesk colleagues to email the script for the morning news headlines show, a script she then read using her iPhone, The Independent informs.

It wasn’t an easy morning. Rooper got to Broadcasting House at 6.15am last Wednesday to present the hourly bulletins on the breakfast show. She soon found out about the system crash: phones weren’t ringing, computers were down, it was stressful.

A few minutes before the news report was due she’d persuaded a colleague to email the script. Rooper, who says she’s “married” to her iPhone with “five pages” of Apps simply read the script from her Apple mobile.

"The words were reasonably clear on my iPhone screen," she said. "But I tried tipping the phone sideways so that the writing becomes bigger and then I lost the whole sentence. You need to read ahead all the time when you are reading out news. I had to tip it back to the right position and just scroll through very quickly with my finger, hoping to God I didn't do something accidentally. My heart was in my mouth but you have to take a deep breath and plunge in."