South West England & CI Thread

Same for the 8:10.

I presume that the regional weather forecast* (*I use the singular, as it's clearly the exact same one for all three bulletins per morning) during GMB is recorded the previous evening. Perhaps Bob Crampton (or whoever else) wasn't available to do it last night for some reason (stuck in the loo?), hence the out-of-vision forecast this morning.

Tonight was the first 6pm programme this year to use the daytime version of the Tamar backdrop.

That said, the "night-time" version is actually dusk, so looks ridiculous at 10:30pm when the real world is usually pitch black outside.

The two recordings of the back wall part of the view are each framed differently. On the daytime version, the east tower of the Tamar (road) Bridge is not visible as it is exactly where one of the vertical "window frames" is. On the night-time version, both towers are visible, as the framing of the whole three-screen view is shifted slightly further across.

During spring & autumn with the previous projection screen "window", it was common for the view to be changed at least once during a single 6pm programme (e.g. from daylight to sunset/dusk, to darkness). All versions of the view back then appeared to be identically framed. If they did that with the current Tamar recordings, the view would noticeably "move" during a single bulletin.

Tonight's bulletin at 1709 will come from BBC Bristol @BBCSpotlight essential engineering work taking place

— Janine Jansen (@JanineJansenTV) March 12, 2016

Amended Spotlight & Points West titles from Bristol.

However watching the regional feeds on iPlayer it seems that South West is still carrying the News Channel?

The title sequence featured the usual template of different curvy shapes on a white background, but the "cat's cradle" lines had no placenames, and the same continuous piece of location footage remained throughout the whole thing (a helicopter/drone shot of some bit of coastline/beach, which I would hazard a guess might be somewhere in the Minehead/Watchet sort of vicinity).

It used the theme music currently used by e.g. South Today (which neither Points West nor Spotlight usually use!). The titles endboard read: "BBC Points West & Spotlight". The presenter explained about the pan-regional situation at both the start and end of the bulletin.

Namestraps were simply "BBC News" branded.

It was a typical Saturday regional bulletin with virtually nothing but sport:

News story from the Forest of Dean.
News story from Plymouth.
Football-related story about an Exeter City home match being postponed and the ground evacuated.
Football results for Bristol City, Swindon Town, Plymouth Argyle, Bristol Rovers, Yeovil Town, Cheltenham Town, Forest Green Rovers, and Torquay United.
Sports story about a former England football player joining Gloucestershire non-league team Longford AFC.
Rugby results for Gloucester Rugby, Exeter Chiefs, and Jersey.
“And finally” item about a humpback whale spotted off the Cornish coast.
Weather forecast.

The Spotlight pan-regional weathermap was used (on which a large chunk of southwest GB plus the Channel Islands are all simultaneously visible), with the addition of a label for Bristol (but no other Points West place names) and omitting the usual label for Yeovil. Additional temperature symbols placed where Gloucestershire and Wiltshire are, whereas wind-speed symbols were placed where Gloucestershire and Yeovil are instead (temp symbols and wind symbols were not shown simultaneously during the forecast).

I thought it was quite a good attempt at a pan-regional bulletin, which respected the names of both and did include stories from both areas.

This isn't the title card they've used before. This one looked rather contrived and hasty. I wouldn't have placed the '&' in such a weird position, although I suppose otherwise it may have made the 'Spotlight' interfere with the cats-cradle names from the west region that appeared at the end.

Furthermore, that weather map is too distorted to show the Points West area properly at that angle: but fab for Ireland, most of southern England and parts of Brittany if they had shown 'foreign weather'.

It's odd how there never seem to be any 'operational reasons' why the joint programme has to come from Plymouth.

http://i68.tinypic.com/2z9hzsx.jpg

Here are the highlights.

Bit of a slippery slope to some bright spark deciding that it worked well enough and maybe they could save a few quid by merging the weekend bulletins permanently.

You would hope that the two teams would be clear that whilst it worked it isn't possible to serve either audience well in the short time they have and so is only ever acceptable in unavoidable circumstances. I imagine this is one advantage for regions with sub regions where the sub can provide the bulletin instead allowing work to take place at the main location.

If it did, I think it would go to Plymouth. You forget they spent a small fortune on upgrading the place to HD (and other things) last year.


ITV abandoned the South West when they merged it with HTV West. I don't think the BBC would make that same mistake.

Plymouth only has one studio, where as Bristol has more than one.

Also, Plymouth has only recently gone through a very major upgrade whereas Bristol hasn't, and maybe this was a planned maintenance time as a result of the upgrade.

ITV didn't totally abandon the South West, there's still the offices and edit suites at Truro, Plymouth, Exeter, Taunton and Weymouth as I understand it. But as a production hub and broadcast location, yeah, they lost a big link with their history when they did that.