Northern Ireland news thread

I think the voice is Thomas Niblock... or possibly U105 News Editor Peter McVerry.

UTV do this sometimes on Friday nights when Tracey Magee isn't on hand to do the late night updates - I've seen cases where David Morgan and my old mate Michelle Napier voiced the Friday night updates, but in the end, someone else presents the bulletins, usually Mr On Your Screens Aidan Browne.

Did Aidan end up doing the 2250 update last night? If Julian wasn't such a diva and read the news...

btw, how was Paul introduced on the ITN Lunchtime News? Were UTV given any kind of credit in the intro, if not on the caption (like the Border reporter on the 2230 news last night) - and nice haircut Ali.

The UTV Focus trailer - bloody Arial on the trail end board!!!

And at last, the 1990s UTV promo showing them preparing an OB and the UTV van on the Giant's Causeway...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PQE2LVBGhs

Just before it all went wrong.

Also:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOz0zuF1ESc

A late evening UTV Live 1996 bulletin with Kate Smith and a pre-clipper Stephen Watson, with weather voiced by Gillian Ievers.

No it ended up being Alison again. She did the lunchtime news and the late bulletin with Tina in the studio for the main programme.



In this case he was credited as "UTV presenter Paul Clark". However when Ken Reid was on the lunchtime news on the day Michael Stone wandered into Stormont he was credited by Alastair Stewart as "Ulster Television's Ken Reid"

I notice on the Radio Times website it has a few more "UTV Election Live" programmes billed for Friday 9th March as well. Are the results usually spread over two days? I always thought the counts were finished the day after.

Yep - 2 days of counting

As there's 108 to be elected, it's done using the rarely used single transferable vote system (STV) which means it's not the top 6 in each constituency, votes are transferred between who people put 1 2 and 3 for on your ballot slip once they've reached the quota. That's what causes it to run into two days of counting and, could, cause it to run into three days.

So they still don't bother starting the vote counts until the morning after the polls close... I thought there were plans to bring NI in line with the rest of the UK and let them begin counting election votes as soon as the polls close?

Assuming that the polls close exactly at 10pm, that is

I've never understood the NI vote-counting policy. Surely if the boxes of ballot papers are sitting around doing nothing for several hours overnight, there's a greater possibility of them theoretically being able to be interfered with. Yes, I realise that they're presumably guarded or something, but that also raises the issue of why pay for security guards and/or locked storage (or whatever it is they do) for overninght, AND pay a bunch of people to count the ballot paper the next day too? Surely there's no good reason for a vote-count to start any later than ASAP after polls close?

There were plans to do overnight counting here, but I dont' know the reason as to why they didn't bother - probably becuase the way of voting here is so complex they know people would be up for 24 hours doing so, hence why it takes so long to do it!

It was originally done the following day for security reasons but quite how and why I don't know. Surely having them unattended for a night was just as much a risk as having them being counted the following day with the same security risks no matter when you did it.

UTV News promo doing the rounds at the minute:

http://www.utvtoday.co.uk/images/utvnews_promo1.jpg

http://www.utvtoday.co.uk/images/utvnews_promo2.jpg

http://www.utvtoday.co.uk/images/utvnews_promo3.jpg

http://www.utvtoday.co.uk/images/utvnews_promo4.jpg

http://www.utvtoday.co.uk/images/utvnews_promo5.jpg

http://www.utvtoday.co.uk/images/utvnews_promo6.jpg

http://www.utvtoday.co.uk/images/utvnews_promo7.jpg

http://www.utvtoday.co.uk/images/utvnews_promo8.jpg

http://www.utvtoday.co.uk/images/utvnews_promo9.jpg

UTV News Promo .wmv 20s 1.11MB

It's the 2002 celebrity idents come back from the grave... not quite.

Just a thought, in the second from last image you can see that half of the floor is painted grey and the other half is painted black. Does this mean that L8 & Live could have come from Studio 1 after all?

Can anyone remember when the last UTV live promo was? I think it the local re-versioning of the neworked ITV News promo about News at Ten going to Eleven which was around 2001.