Will Our Dad, there's nowt ont telly toneet.

As one person said:

“The transmitter probably had enough of the amount of repeats, reality rubbish, cookery and bailiff programmes that it decided to end it.”

Z.

Not really the sort of thing that an SPD of the consumer unit size would have really done much.

Think more like the air horn spark gaps on an overhead line..

It is usual to plant the mast in a way that it and it's guys are solidly grounded, and then the wiring to it ‘just’ has to hold off the voltage surge that occurs when the 50kA or whatever runs to ground during the strike.. (which is still a lot - 50kA times an electrode equivalent resistance of a few ohms is a hundreds of kV - not for long, but still a challenge for the transmitter electronics which sort of bounces up and down in its cabin riding on the local step voltage -  giviing a serious  stress for the feed cables bringing power and telemetry up the hill. Sites with a microwave uplink and no telephone cables fare a bit better.)

RF transformers come to the rescue a bit, but at some point they too yield to the inevitable.

Mike.

I was amused by the reported comment from one deprived viewer:  “There are only so many times you can read the same book before you get bored” 

If that were true all the Sky satellites would have gone super-nova years ago