London Live

No, they have a "short" of some droning electronic music over some footage of wind turbines which they seem to play when they have nothing else to show. Like between the 6.30pm headlines and 6.45pm news reports. It lasts about 10 minutes, but you might, if as lucky as I was the other day, see 40 minutes of it between 6pm and 7pm.

I must say the new presenter Stefan who does the weather and traffic is a massive improvement! It still kills me why they didn't think how the window would look on dark mornings, they all just blend in with the background.

Something needs to be done about this backdrop

Canal Plus in France managed to work around the "too-dark-before-daybreak" problem quite nicely on their morning show:

Might help if Gavin wore a brighter shirt !

That and maybe some sort of backlight or the video WW Update posted.

It's really very bad that they didn't see this problem coming - especially as Gavin himself worked on Daybreak, which had exactly the same issue.

A quick fix would just be to paint the window frames back to their original grey (or maybe even something a bit more colourful), as that would at least break up the expanse of blackness.

Nice yellow shirt, with nice light lights around the windows, and a blue screen to the left for information.

This was an issue when London Live launched - and has been an issue ever since... The grey window frames helped a little - but not much.

Employing a lighting director with a modest equipment budget would solve these issues in a flash. That studio has lots of nice textures for an LD to work with - and there's plenty of depth if only they'd point the cameras in the right direction.

If London Live had any managers with TV eyes they'd know that lighting is vital and would be fighting to spend money on it.

Precisely. Also, I suspect that the DSLRs may not be doing them any favours either, particularly when it comes to camera control. To make a window-based studio work you need a good LD and VS/racks operator to work together to set things up.

Even Daybreak didn't look this bad...

Indeed:

http://i59.tinypic.com/kbu3ab.png