News 24 on Doctor Who

Was it me or was there a slight mistake with the N24 graphics on Doctor Who last night?

I know I'm being picky, but the 'No fatalities' on the black strap was centred, which I didn't think normally happened.

And yes, I do realise how geeky I now sound for combining my two geek loves - TV pres and Doctor Who...

It tends to be that there has to be something slightly wrong with any N24 type appearance on a drama - if it was perfect some people may think it is for real. It tends to be real presenters but with something different with the graphics or the set. But sometimes it's the real look with non-familiar presenters or actors.

You're right:
http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/tmp1.jpg

There was also another minor glitch with the graphics which you haven't mentioned. On the large headline strap, the right side of the headline extended further than it should have done, well out of the safe areas.

The 'ZE' of the headline "DEPARTMENT STORE BLAZE" extended over the red end-bar on the lower information line, when it should in fact align to the right edge of the black information text area:
http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/tmp2.jpg

...and for those keeping tabs on such things, the information detail on the super says "Henrick's dept. store ripped apart by explosion".

Apologies for blurry caps.

But as that was a 4:3 picture then surely everything you saw was in the safe areas?

I am so sick of seeing news channels - N24 in particular - appearing in dramas.

They don't add anything, it's just for purposes of cross-promotion.

Really tedious now. Doesn't seem to be a BBC drama featuring some sort of a disaster that hasn't shown News 24.

Actually, that's a good point. But as that's a 4:3 set, then the N24 logo should by rights be right up against the edge of the screen. They seem to have formatted the graphics to look like widescreen on the 4:3 set. When you watch N24 on a 4:3 set the graphics will be cropped off at either side with the logo up against the left edge, and the headline extending up to the right edge. From the image on Rose's TV, it clearly wasn't letterboxed as the whole image fills the screen.

And I think that you're being a bit harsh, cat. I agree that this particular instance was nothing but shameless self-promotion (and there have indeed been a couple of others) but the BBC is usually pretty good with this stuff, like including Sky and ITV News on its IF programmes, or often just including 'anonymous' news for other programmes like Spooks. This kind of blatant and obvious self-promotion is broadly the exception more than the rule. I don't think Sky was too blatant either when it did its similar doomsday scenario programmes on Sky One a few months ago as well.

In which case, I would have expected the graphics to look more different - I'm sure only us TV presheads notice little differences like the ones I and BBC LDN (thanks for the pictures by the way) spotted.

I'd be surprised if someone seeing a news report on a TV in a TV programme would think it was real, but then there are some daft people around.

In the first of the images posted by BBC LDN the clock says 20:45. About 2 or 3 minutes later the clock still says 20:45 (second image). Is this just a little mistake, or is it totally accurate... if you think about it Rose could've been thrown into some sort of intergalactic time warp where for those few minutes time stood still.

I think what's happened as far as the graphics are concerned is this:

http://www.leeseaman.com/stuff/tvforum/who24.gif

The graphics are made for widescreen, but for some reason have been squashed to fit onto a 4:3 screen instead of being cropped. This is also why the graphics look squashed, although you can argue that the TV is being filmed from a certain angle (making the graphics on the screen look squashed), I've looked back at the programme and the TV is being filmed almost from the front.

I'd say it was probably just a small mistake, the graphics could well have been a static image* mocked up in widescreen, then later squashed to fit onto the video. Does that make sense?

*Edit: Looked again and it's not a static image, the world is spinning. Interesting... wouldn't lose sleep over it though.

Looking at the caps, it's pretty clear that the graphics haven't just been squashed horizontally as your illustrations suggest. Take a look at the Tower on the screen; it's correctly proportioned. In your illustration, the Tower is much more squashed, almost a square.

It looks like the whole graphics set was somehow resized proportionally (both X and Y axes) to fit the widescreen graphics onto a 4:3 set. Bizarrre.

to be fair it was two blink and you miss it glimpses of a news report on TV and not the full blown badly acted insert like in supervolcano the other week.

I agree with the sentiment though as I'm getting bored of seeing random bits of news channel footage in shows too.For things like The Day Britain Stopped it was quite good as they got footage from all the broadcasters and fitted them nicely into the timeline

Back to Doctor Who though, who was on the breakfast sofa when Rose was making the Doctor coffee? Was it Bill and Natasha?

Breakfast was also on the television - Natasha was presenting and she was with either Dermot, or more likely, Simon.

It was Natasha and Dermot in the Breakfast Studio I believe

Here are some better quality caps:


I agree with what other people have said about the graphics being abit wrong, the tower doesn't look perfect either though