BBC Election 2015

No she posted on twitter recently that she would be back soon

*Disclaimer - post below contains a lot of uninformed speculating*

Picking up on this comment/thought I'm guessing there must be practical reasons for using a separate studio instead of parts of Broadcasting House.

I guess theoretically the preferred studio at broadcasting house would be studio B. Glancing at the schedule there was no Newsnight on election night, and no Victoria Derbyshire the following morning. It would mean World News staying in C for the following afternoon or using A or E. Theoretically for an interview area they could use the One Show's studio, especially if they plan to use the piazza again for the map & building projections.

I imagine in the next 5 years AR technology will become powerful enough for them to potentially do away with having a green screen area. It was noticeable how this time touch-screen technology was used a lot more this year, both on the night and from the weather presentation area (studio K?). I wonder if the green screen is now being used more for historical reasons than because it's the most practical method, compared to during the 90s and 00s. Personally I quite liked the (network) referendum coverage from Pacific Quay which kept it relatively simple and made use of the building.

As far as I could see, the only reason there was a green screen area was for the "paving slabs to Downing Street" and for Jeremy to stand inside the house of commons. The Big Ben swingometers, while neat, were gimmicky and pointless, as the swing had been dealt with by Emily.

However you are ignoring the large amount of behind-the-scenes infrastructure you don't see on-air that would need to be rigged and integrated, and the days of rehearsals and testing of the infrastructure.

You probably also need to consider that the galleries in W1A are designed for heavy automation - even B uses very automated playout and graphics - and the election is one news programme in particular that is very difficult to automate effectively. (They don't even use ENPS scripting for it)

Given how shambolic some of the links were on the programme within the same studio, I have no idea why anyone would think it would be a good idea to use seemingly two or three different studios at once. As mentioned, the election programme actually does demand a large studio. It's a massive event, the big showpiece of BBC News and the most complex programme they do, and it's not like they're doing it every five minutes, it is a very rare occasion that BBC News needs and deserves a major studio operation.

The BBC own the studio as well, so if they didn't use it, it would be there sitting idle and wasting money. There's not even the argument that it's inconvenient that news is based at Broadcasting House while the election studio is in Elstree, because in the seventies and eighties the election programme was the responsibility of the current affairs department, who were based in Lime Grove, but the studio was always at Television Centre.

Although the obvious come back to that is it didn't demand a large studio for Sky or ITV. Rehearsal though is the key word here and where having effectively a separate operation is really an advantage - even if Broadcasting House could quite comfortably accomodate the show on the night it probably doesn't have the capacity to dedicate the space to it for weeks prior.

ITV are only on air for a couple of hours a day - plenty of time to rehearse / build / test throughout the day.
Sky built a second set and kitted that out - yeah, not the same size as the BBC studio, but they were crammed in there, and they were only using it for one thing, unlike the about 5 that the BBC used their space for.

I agree, the general election is the showpiece event for BBC News that only comes around once every five years and if you start scrimping and saving on that you might as well close down.

The only questionable bit was having Rita in London for no apparent reason. The BBC like to show off NBH recently following the loss of the iconic TV Centre so the Sophie Raworth bit was perfectly alright as well.

In fact one thing ITV might like to borrow for 2020 is to project the exit poll and results on the side of The London Studios. Would they need planning permission for that?!

what a pile of rubbish, it was advertised as " election you expected or is it the one you wanted" it was really talking about SNP and UKIP and some-others bits and bobs, rather a disappointing let down

I don't think this was commented on but it seems Newsround also had some reworked titles/music for the election:



From my count that means that the end of the Ten, Reporting Scotland and Newsround all had some extra strings applied to their music for the election.

Not sure if anyone has shared this clip yet:


The music used sounds similar to the London Olympics closing titles in 2012.

Is it likely next year's elections will come from Elstree? After all it is a 'Super Thursday' - Holyrood, Senedd, Stormont, GLA and London Mayoral elections as well as local elections.