ITV News

Id suspect so... maybe even Ranvir or Lucrezia, or a now rare NaT outing for James Mates

Did this have anything to do with ITV+1 cutting to a holding slide during the Vienna report?

So they only actually have 4 of their main news presenters in the uk for the next two weeks?(not including Ranvir because I assume she’ll have training so won’t be able to do as much) and then some reporters and correspondents that anchor.

Of course this week’s lockdown news is important, but I think people are very interested in what’s happening in the US and it’s a bit of a breather from the constant UK Covid news.

The lockdown vote will be of no major significance to people’s lives. It’s going to pass.

Yes the 'lockdown' news has happened, Wednesday is a formality.

The US election is a big story, especially this time round when it will have a direct impact on UK government policy leading up to Jan 1st.

Besides the people that have been sent out to the US went out over the last few weeks. Plus they'll all have to quarantine when they come back so won't be able to work on this week's news if they came back to the UK

Well, they will be able to contribute something surely while in quarantine, ?

They'll be able to make just as much contribution from their house as they can from the US

Ooh yes, if there’s something I’m not totally fed up with and looking forward to more of, it’s people contributing to tv shows from home via Zoom!

That's not going to go away, even if the virus does !

I was thinking more of quarantined staff (not all of whom have on screen roles anyway) still performing 'backroom tasks' at home.

Yes, although there have been occasions in the past when it hasn't been the biggest story in Britain on election day - 1984 is a great example when the race was a foregone conclusion and there was a traffic jam of big stories in Britain with the State Opening of Parliament and the CBI Conference (plus the first ever Turner Prize, you note).
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1984-11-06

1992 was an interesting one in that although the election was a big story and led to a new President, the result seemed a foregone conclusion (there was an interesting article the other day about one-term presidents, and unlike Thatcher who was able to call an election after the Falklands War and win handsomely, Bush couldn't call one after the Gulf War which had been a success and had to wait, while the economy went down the toilet), and the autumn of 1992 was a huge period for British politics, just after Black Wednesday and with all the chaos surrounding Maastricht. Of course the 1992 coverage on the Beeb was notorious for the graphics going wrong and at one point predicting a landslide for Ross Perot.

1992, 1996 and 2000 were the only occasions I think ITV didn't do overnight coverage for the US elections, seemingly not thinking it was worth the bother and concentrating on the main bulletins (similiar to how in the mid-nineties they also stopped taking the Budget live for a few years and opted for an extended teatime news instead). I think 1996 was the last "boring" US election where the result was obvious from the start of the campaign and there was minimal interest in the UK.

Was it in 1997 or so when ITV temporarily stopped have a separate Budget programme? They definitely had a separate programme in 1996, using the rather interesting remix of the main news theme:


And I think they started again in 2000 but not sure after that. At some point it got lumped in with the Lunchtime News.

Wow! Don't remember that music at all.