Coronavirus | Television News Coverage

The word “confusion” should be banned from every headline sequence. I think they thrive on it and encourage it.

This story will lead every bulletin and Breakfast until one of two things, either a minister gets interviewed on Sunday morning and says something about something which is then made into a big deal, or some sort of random experts that nobody has ever heard of feature in an article in a Weekend broadsheet, and whatever they predict is reported as fact.

Whilst I’m on one, here’s another one, stop sending reporters to the very edge of ‘local lockdowns’ pointing out one street that is included and the next one that isn’t. We all know what a borough boundary looks like!

The idea it's "confusing" due to different rules applying in Scotland and Wales to England and NI is insulting too - not just to the devolution process but to every single person who lives in them too. They're trying to say it's confusing because they're all taking the same advice, but in life advice is always interpreted differently by different people. Just ask Dominic Cummings.

Personally I think the local lockdown situation is far more confusing than any differences between nations, and bringing it back to the travel situation it doesn't make sense that the UK government is very keen to avoid national lockdowns by using local lockdowns instead, but then applying blanket travel bans to certain countries - probably to avoid any confusion!

Times must have changed since I was a kid (in the 90s). I don't remember ever going back to school before 4th September. And never on a Friday either, so it would've been the 7th or 8th the way this year's dates fall.

A lot depends on when the six weeks holiday starts in July and how the dates fall. If you get a late "finish", it tends to morph into a late start at the other end in September. This year the August Bank holiday fell smack bang on the last day of August and just so happened to correspond with the end of the holiday. In other circumstances you get anywhere up to another week after that.

Of course it could be argued the entire concept of a six week holiday period throughout the summer is an anachronistic thing. There's obviously some historic reason why it happened in the first place, which presumably no longer happens today, but "summer break" is not unique to this country so who knows?

I'm old enough to remember when the summer school holiday was 8 weeks (happy days!) I think it was 2000 when it became 6 weeks.

I think the earliest i ever went back to school was 25th August,on a Tuesday (in the 90s). Most years i went back on a Thursday, never ever on a Friday.

I don't remember the summer holidays ever being 8 weeks.

Nor do I remember when or why people started calling it the '6 week holidays' rather than 'the summer holidays'

Also don't remember most of the country ever being 8 weeks - it was 6 weeks for state schools (certainly in the north west), in the 80s/90s - I got 8 weeks as I was at private school with slightly longer days.

It was definitely 8 weeks in Leicester in the 1990s.

Always six weeks for me (1969 to 1980)

At my school we had 9 weeks for Summer. It went from the end of the 1st week in July to the start of the 2nd week in September. I think it was partly because for the Spring half-term we only had 2 days instead of a week. Lovely.

I was at secondary school 1993-1998 and six weeks holiday was just that, six weeks holiday (give or take). Its only been relatively recently with the appearance of academies and whatever else that schools can vary their holiday schedule if they wish, or take the default ones the council applies to the schools it funds.

I think schools may have had a period of discretion, or at least more discretion than they seem to have now, it certainly wasn't uncommon to slap a training day or two either side of a holiday, whereas these days I suspect teacher training days are effectively all shoved into school holiday periods, such is the "harm" of one missing day for pupls (although of course a lot of them have just had six months and can still walk and talk at the same time so...)

The EPG has changed with a BBC News Special now airing 3:45-5:15pm on BBC One

Pointless airs as scheduled at 5:51

The press conference airing an hour earlier than was previously the norm