Can I say I hated the original presentation - the flags, the small desks, it didn't say "news" at all.
I’m pretty sure that was the point.
It might be why I like it - it was fresh and colourful. It was a direct contrast to the bulletins on BBC1 at the time, which in comparison now seemed dated, boring, stuffy, with the cold blue background and pompous orchestral theme music. The early News 24 showed that news presentation doesn't have to be done that way. The October 1999 revamp felt like a step backwards in some respects (apart from the countdown, of course!)
I'm afraid our current archive deal prevented us doing that, we did what we could, sorry if that wasn't enough.
Chris, out of interest, I'd love to know if the BBC still has original copies of its BBC News idents/countdowns etc. Is that sort of stuff kept for posterity or deleted/destroyed after its useful life?
Many thanks for all your efforts yesterday - it was fantastic to see the old flags again in particular!
Sadly, as I found out while researching bits for the birthday, nothing is kept clean or as a kit of parts.
In my experience those sort of tapes live on the desks of directors, drawers at the back of galleries or in bags on shelves at the back of tape vaults and stay there long after they are replaced as no one knows what to do with them.
Problem with the News Channel is that all those locations would have been sorted out and cleared when they moved buildings
Last edited by Inspector Sands on 10 November 2017 8:31pm - 3 times in total
:-(
A former member
Where there not transfer over the the new digital system?
I'm more curious about the 'copywrite issues' with some of the countdowns that meant they couldn't be part of the nostalgiafest yesterday afternoon/evening.
If they BBC paid for them to be produced - they retain the copyright, don't they?
Unless correspondents have, like some premiership footballers have, 'image rights' when mean they can't be featured in repeats - pretty weird state of affairs if that was the case.
Or is it a case that the countdowns were produced by an indie for BBC News, and after the BBC no longer were going to play them out, the copyright went back to the indie production company?
I'm more curious about the 'copywrite issues' with some of the countdowns that meant they couldn't be part of the nostalgiafest yesterday afternoon/evening.
If they BBC paid for them to be produced - they retain the copyright, don't they?
Unless correspondents have, like some premiership footballers have, 'image rights' when mean they can't be featured in repeats - pretty weird state of affairs if that was the case.
Or is it a case that the countdowns were produced by an indie for BBC News, and after the BBC no longer were going to play them out, the copyright went back to the indie production company?
I don't think it's a copyright issue, more the cost of getting materials out of the archive. IIRC you have to pay for each item you request from the archive, and that would have limited the number of requests they could make for this project.
It's probably because not all the footage in them was the BBC's. Could have been stock footage bought in for a limited time or from an organisation they once had a deal with
Just a guess but they've recently cut ties with ABC and AP so wouldn't be able to use anything from them