The new NEW Central West and BBC Midlands thread

He's better than the terrible Matt Teale

Would you care to elaborate on that?

Obviously Bob has been on a lot more since his break, and on his usual days off, and this may be the reason why.

Matt is on paternity leave after the birth of his son earlier in the week.

http://www.itv.com/news/central/update/2017-04-07/meet-tiny-teale/

Wesley was covering the rebranded People's Projects giving out the big cheques last. Always highly amusing with his attempts at a poker face.

Midlands Today is getting a new studio...

Just about to turn the lights off in the @bbcmtd studio. Re-build of our set over the next couple of weeks. Exciting. pic.twitter.com/l5Tc2RpUXb

— Toby Horwood (@TobyHorwood) April 14, 2017

Bit strange - the current set isn't that old, and there are many regions who had a studio refit before Midlands Today got their current set, and so probably need it more!

Good riddance that set has been so bland. Fingers crossed for an improvement. I hope the decamp will mean the lovely views over the Gas Street basin.

About time. It's one of the worse CSO studio backdrops on regional television, especially in comparison to BBC East Midlands Today. BBC Breakfast could do with some major work as well, it looks so false. Why do they bother with these fake newsroom backdrops anyway? ITV News looks great but who's heard of a newsroom with no staff? Sky News looks like they're on the top floor of somewhere like Birmingham New Street station on a Sunday. How much do they pay these guys to design sets - some posters on here do a damn better job.

I wonder if they'll open up the Newsroom view again? I doubt it but who knows.

I imagine we would get something akin to BBC Spotlight. Though knowing Midlands Today it'll be a very small scale revamp.

I suspect Spotlight has more space to play with - BBC Birmingham is known as the Shoebox for a reason! The TV studio is particularly small, but kind of worked with the real newsroom there to give it depth

Have they had a reduction in staff since the last time that they used the newsroom? It would be lovely to see it used again as long as it's not a deserted space.

No, the Mailbox (in general) has has actually had an increase in staff I think, as they've moved The Academy there, which provides BBC training courses. Certainly if they opened up the view through to the newsroom you'd see people again, especially at 1330.

The big problem with real newsroom backdrops is they simply look empty during evening transmissions because the vast majority of staff aren't there anymore or are actually working in the gallery or edit suites on the programme itself.

The backdrop at the mailbox isn't CSO either - it's several flatscreen monitors built into the set. Unfortunately the ones chosen suffer with colour temperature change when shot at a sharp angle, so unless you're head on to them the ones at the edges of shot look a slightly different colour.

The glass wall through to the newsroom caused the lighting directors many a problem back in the day as they were fighting with many different light sources.. daylight from skylights above and the far windows, tungsten in the studio, flourescent in the newsroom. Pretty tricky to balance and, when there's no lighting expertise available (at breakfast for example), hard to set up a compromise state.

Anyway, it'd be good to see what changes they make. Wonder whether it's a full scale change of the set or a refresh?