ITV50 Evening News week (19-23 September 2005)

Everything is changing. You're right. Central news are decamping at some point in December to somewhere else in 22 Gas Street while their set is stripped out from Studio West.

Thanks Robert for these videos - in pristine quality too. I have all the bulletins on tatty VHS hidden somewhere in the house!



Everything? Calendar has just moved into a slightly revamped version of what we have now (with the new sofas and higher desk), so I assumed the basic set-up we have now was remaining, just that the graphics and colours were changing.

Thanks all, glad you're enjoying them. I do agree that 2004-2006 was a very good era of ITV News presentation. As I recall, it was almost universally liked by people at the time. The 2006 rebrand seems like a step backwards to me.

BBCNicky, I'm pleased you like the quality. I seem to recall buying my first DVD recorder around 2005 - these bulletins were taken off the DVD I created at the time. Plus, I think I used a digital source (either Freeview or Sky) for those recordings, hence the good quality. I'm glad I preserved them now. To be honest, I'm surprised they haven't been put online in their entirety before now.

Agree completely about the 2004-2006 look for ITV News. I loved it. It was so radical at the time, but executed brilliantly and was really slick. Changing to teal was the worst thing they ever did, and it hasn't been as good since I don't think.

As I understand it, Calendar have adopted bits from other regions that used to operate two sets, and they have 2 old sofas and 1 of the old Central East sofas, the desk itself I'm not sure where it came but it's not hard to strike a new set!

The source for this information was an email to ITV Central when I asked them to tone down the yellow as it was getting a bit garish (still is but they listened) - they told me change was gonna happen towards the end of the year in the new colour palette that should look nicer!

If things were going to stay the same Central's set would be getting on for a decade old, and it looks it!

I do think the regions desperately need new sets - indeed if they'd remained independent most regions would have probably gone through 3-4 sets over the last 9 years. They've made good use of lighting in updating the set for each look, but changed little else.

And taking this vaguely back on topic but those regional titles from 2004 were the best of the generic bunch too - and I'll be showing my love again here for the 4 square motif but it worked brilliantly, linking each region to the ITV brand without having to slap the ITV News logo on screen. The opt outs into the integrated regional bulletins were brilliant too - they looked good and always sounded absoloutely seemless, unlike the BBC where even 13 years on there is still an obvious change in the headline bed in many regions and they just do a straight cut from the national to the regions, not even sparing seven seconds for a few beeps to close the national bulletin.