Clamp Cable Network, uhm M-Net, finds all the pesky gremlins and restores its broadcast service to normal. The world is safe again.

If you want to get a sense of what it's been like the past few weeks at the technical broadcasting side of M-Net at the pay broadcaster's state-of-the-art, yet under siege, Broadcast Centre in Randburg, go take a look at Gremlins 2.

Although viewers might be miffed at all the ''mistakes'' that's been cropping up on-screen on various M-Net channels the past few weeks, M-Net's technical staff won't laugh when they watch the scene in Gremlins 2 where the critters (don't feed them after midnight!) literally take over the broadcast of all the channels of the Clamp Cable Network. So bad of course it gets (they even take over the vampire late night talk show) that because of all the gremlins Clamp Broadcasting just decides to shut down and end the transmission. ''Due to the end of civilization as we know it the Clamp Cable Network is now ceasing transmission," is the last thing viewers see before the big C goes dark.

Of course M-Net and its big M didn't have the luxury (although they do have vampire shows like The Vampire Diaries and True Blood) to just cease transmission when the pay broadcaster had to face its own set of gremlins that invaded its Broadcast Centre after switching over to a new broadcast server in the middle of August. Now M-Net's broadcast engineers and technical crew have found and finally fixed the IT system glitch and eradicated all those gremlins that created havoc with the play-out system. A broadcast system engineer also arrived in South Africa yesterday from the company that M-Net bought the new server system from to help find those last pesky gremlins.

According to Eddie McAlone, M-Net's technical director for operations,  M-Net's broadcast services team worked non-stop for days to address this unique, unexpected situation. ''The first step was to resolve the underlying problem in the new IT broadcast system. Thereafter we had to identify all the corrupted files among the thousands on the system and reload these files, while also dealing with additional backlogs as a result of the glitches.''

''While some of our channels have been running perfectly from shortly after the hiccups first occurred, we are back to normal on all our M-Net channels as of yesterday,'' says Eddie McAlone. ''The implementation of a massive server upgrade such as this takes place every five to ten years,'' says Patricia Scholtemeyer, M-Net CEO, who thanked viewers for their patience today. ''Normally viewers don't even notice the shift. Interaction and comments from our subscribers and clients, as well as the dedication of our staff, helped to rectify many of the glitches,'' she says.

ALSO READ: kykNET's major mess with wrong announcements has viewers fuming.