There was something of a post-dinner slumber about the press room at the Crucible on Thursday night. Suddenly, a voice piped up: "All the televisions have gone off."

We were in the opening stages of the World Snooker Championship semi-final between Mark Allen and Wu Yize at this iconic theatre in Sheffield when the screens had indeed gone blank. I rushed down the corridor to the tournament office to find all the TV coverage had gone off there too. There was clearly some sort of power outage.

It wasn't a complete power cut in the whole building however, as play was continuing out in the arena.

Viewers watching BBC Two had their snooker watching rudely interrupted at around 7.50pm. Instead, they were served up a nature programme that seemed to be dominated by sheep.

The players did then leave the arena at the conclusion of the third frame, going back to their dressing rooms for around five minutes. At this stage, television screens backstage began to flicker back into life.

I saw the tournament director, Mike Ganley, speak to both players in the corridor outside the dressing rooms to explain the situation, saying that organisers hoped the temporary power issues were now resolved, but there may be a longer mid-session interval.

For many people present, it brought back memories of a far more serious issue here three years ago, on the night when a Just Stop Oil protestor jumped onto one of the tables and covered it with orange powder during the match between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry.

As an interesting aside, one of the players on the other table that night was Allen, taking on Fan Zhengyi.

Another Just Stop Oil protester tried to glue herself to that table, but was stopped by match referee Olivier Marteel.

This turned out to be a far lower key matter than that. Everyone was pretty calm, which is impressive when you consider that a nationwide audience was unable to watch a major sporting event taking place.

Everything went back to normal again soon enough, although there's no question that the broadcasting technicians will be doing some investigating of their own to find out the precise nature of the problem.

I've been covering this great sporting event long enough now to know that you should always expect the unexpected.

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