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BBC Radio 2 presenter Jeremy Vine apologised to listeners during his Thursday lunchtime show after a fire alarm forced him off the air.
A voice saying ‘please leave the building immediately’ could be heard in the background as the TV and radio presenter, 59, explained that he needed to evacuate due to an alarm.
There was a 30-second silence after he played the song Are Friends Electric? by Gary Numan, before a music playlist began.
Lauren Laverne’s Radio 6 Music programme experienced a 30-second silence as well.
Vine told listeners: ‘I’ve just been told that we have a fire, or there’s a fire alarm, so I’m gonna play some music and I do apologise, this hasn’t happened in 20 years.
‘Let’s just play some music and we’re going to have to leave the building.”
After the track Can’t Stop The Feeling! by Justin Timberlake played, he said: ‘It’s BBC Radio 2, Jeremy Vine here, well I do apologise we actually had a proper fire alarm there.
‘It wasn’t a fire, but we had the thing, I’ve not had this in 20 years, where not just one light goes off but two.
‘So you get the orange light, which means there could be a fire and then we had the full red light and the annoucement in the studio, which looked as if there was one.
‘We came out the building, we stood outside in the sun, there’s no fire, we came back in.’
Vine then added: ‘Because there is no fire, we are going to cancel the item we are doing on cremation.’
Listeners were baffled by the turn of events, as @thorndyke_art wrote on X: ‘Wow.. Actual dead air live on BBC Radio 2.. Fire alarm goes off at the studios during Jeremy Vine slot and the building’s been evacuated by the guess of it.. Never heard a radio station go silent like that before and now it seems like it’s on auto-pilot..’
The presenter then introduced a guest, chief economic adviser at Allianz and president of Queens’ College Cambridge, Mohamed Abdullah El-Erian, who was also evacuated.
Vine added: ‘Well, it was a very impressive evacuation by the BBC, we’ve got to take it seriously obviously.’
It comes as the BBC celebrates World Book Day, with Vine joined by The Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson on his show.
As Julia’s niece is actually rising star Lola Young – the musician behind the hit viral song Messy, which she performed at the Brits the other weekend – Vine did something quite unusual on his show today.
Naturally, he performed the Gruffalo’s version of the hit song while dressed as the mythical beast, with lyrics such as: ‘Because I’m too hairy, and my knees are knobbly.
‘My eyes they are so orange and my bag is prickly. My teeth are perfect, when I open my big mouth. Yes my tongue is black, is that not allowed?’
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