BBC News 24 and World - 90s flags presentation

Yes, that's an overnight. In the early days of News 24, there were separate overnight bulletins, World even produced one of their bulletins for transmission on News 24 during a back half-hour ISTR (rather like the 0930 BBC World bulletin that News 24 carried for a long time). Joint bulletins from 0100 until 0500 became the norm in around 1998. It took quite a while to persuade the News Channel to leave a second of silence at the top of the hour for World to get in cleanly (as demonstrated by that clip). There was an awkward time when BBC World retained the flags but News 24 had gone Lambie-Narin: so overnight BBC World had a very different look to the rest of the day.

Slightly off topic, but here goes. When BBC News went on strike in 1998, News 24 and World joined up for a special service with Sian Williams, as shown in the clip below. Did this strike affect domestic news output, and in what way? Apparently Breakfast News wasn't shown, and was replaced with News 24 and repeats of Call My Bluff. Who did the BBC1 bulletins on this day? Was it Nicholas Witchell, or Michael Buerk, who I believed covered the strikes in 1994.

ISTR that rather than World doing a back half-hour for the BBC News 24/BBC One service, they did a xx:15 to xx:30 segment when they had short bulletins at the TOTH (in the days before the joint BBC World / BBC News 24 / BBC One service)

The opt-in was always fun. A second of silence always looked and sounded pretty bad - you should be able to do opts with less than a second if you do them properly...

Yep - though I have a recollection it was in early June not May wasn't it? BBC One domestic output was replaced by bulletins produced by the joint BBC News 24 / BBC World service - which was manned by non-union staff prepared to break the strike and management. Can't remember the presenting line-up.

Ahh, yes the xx15 opt out ... I remember Adrian Fineghan being uber serious xx00-15, then saying "This is BBC News" <pause> then saying "and now it's just us here in the UK ..." and visibly relaxing into the shirt-sleeves style that News 24 was in the early days!!

Ahh, the long hours sitting in NC1 monitoring the overnight News 24 simulcast ...



I think that youtube must have been one of the early ones. Certainly by the time I was directing in BBC World pres, News had got it nailed, and yes it wasn't usually a second if we'd all got ourselves sorted out. A lot of the time, BBC World Pres cut to news automatically when the automation got to the top of the hour, but if there were no commercial partners joining a dirty feed of World at the top of an hour, I would always do it manually, prefading News 24 to make sure it was clean. Perhaps I needed to get out more in those days

I hate the flags. That is all.

I love the flags myself, it was a different era!

I loved the transmission pulses and pips that followed, but the flags were fantastic, relaxed but professional at the same time! Dave Hewson of ITV fame wrote the music!

The final flags era on World had better music than the previous era, although the presentation moved away from Virtual Reality to being newsroom based. It's been mentioned on here several times, but the special editions of the flag music (sombre versions, as we all called them) were quite outstanding. In particular, the long intro and extro from The World Today (circa 98/99) which was used in the Balkans War massacre of Sarajevo was possibly one of the best ever news themes in existence.

In the period around 97 to 99, the overnight simulcast was a flag-branded generic BBC News, and I always got the impression that the overnights were presented from a small pres desk in a corridor at the top of the famous stairwell that often appears in the BBC News trails, and from where Zeinab Badawi is often seen standing for her WNT trail. The simulcasts back then only used one shot, no side shots or pans, and were typically a head on view of the presenter on duty, with an overlaid image of the blue and yellow sun flag. Typically, the presenter of those would be Jane Hill, Janet Barrie, George Ekyn and Peter Coe. Occasionally, Adrian Finighan too.

The branding and generally appearance of the overnights was somewhat out of tune with the rest of the World output at the time. It often felt like an Ikea invasion somehow.

This is rather nice:



Not too keen on the break filler though - sounds a bit like Zelda or something.

Good heavens Rob, no. Even viewers of BBC World in those days had to wear three-piece pinstripe suits, bowler hats and have starched collars. LOL. And it was even more strict for us men!!!!

Joking aside, World never really dipped into the "casual dress" mode except once a week when there was a sofa based programme (presented by Brian Hanrahan, I think) where they covered various topics of the week. I can't remember what it's called now.

The closest we get even these days to being casual is Ros Atkins and Gavin Esler tie-less for WHYS and DL respectively.

Both the flags and 1999 pres were by Lambie Nairn.

Yes, as Rob says, it's an overnight. Just before the Dateline ad, the "coming up" slide verifies that the BBC News is next, at 0200 and 0300 GMT according to the slide.