20 years of the BBC News Channel (BBC News 24)

Thursday 9th November 2017 marks 20 years since the BBC News Channel (aka BBC News 24 back in the day) was launched on NTL analogue cable and BBC One overnight. At the time being billed as the forerunner of the BBC's new digital services. It sounds like the occasion is going to be marked in some way tomorrow so it will be great to hopefully see some classic clips of the original "car crash in a shower room" studio N9 and hopefully N8 too from the original flags era. BBC News 24 launched at 5:30pm on the Sunday evening with a preview program looking at the history of BBC News. The first live news bulletin came at 6pm with Gavin Esler & Sarah Montague.

And it looked something like this

http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/identzone/bbc_news_weather/images/news_24_30_second_countdown.jpg

http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/identzone/bbc_news_weather/images/news_24_flag_wide.jpg



The remaining bit of launch era News 24 still on the air today is the theme tune of Dateline London, unchanged since 1997.

https://youtu.be/8cfIkCPiHx8?t=3m1s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=824ZFW7v0XA

I think Jane Hill is the only member of original presenters still with the channel, all the others have either taken up other roles within the BBC or left in recent years.

It was noteworthy how separate BBC News 24 (it was part of a "Continuous News" department) was from the rest of BBC TV news at the time of launch. It did take a long time to align the channel with changes to set & branding, progressive simulcasts of Breakfast, 1, 6 and 10, and sharing studios.

The independent review by former Financial Times Editor Richard Lambert for the DCMS in 2002 gives a good account of its launch:

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.bbccharterreview.org.uk/pdf_documents/independentreviewnews24.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/02_february/20/lambert_response.pdf

BBC News 24 was more aligned with BBC World & BBC News Online branding when it first launched. I think it was October 1999 when it adopted the same look & feel as BBC One news programmes with BBC World adopting the look in April 2000.

Cor, that flag music makes me feel nice and fuzzy.

The up to the hour music is quite soothing.

Man i remember going to sleep with News 24 in the background

Also they should do something special for their 20th year. Maybe bring back the old idents for one night only

The News 24 flags were an evolution of the BBC World flags idents which had been in use for a couple of years. I think the two services still had a few differences between them - as someone who had access to BBC World, but not News 24, it was mostly obvious on the overnight service. (Can anyone remember if that was shared from the start?)

A little bit of the flags lived on in the old News Centre right up until it closed : look at the frosted glass partition on the balustrade:

World and News 24 overnights were separate at the start ISTR but they definitely merged at some point during the flags era.

Longer than that, they pre-dated BBC World in fact and were in use as the titles for the news on BBC World Service Television too, and also the first incarnation of BBC Arabic

I assume they changed to the more familiar flags when the new BBC logo came out in October 1997 and then News 24 launched with similar ones the month after.

IIRC, one of them changed to the red and cream design before the other, which made overnights a bit of a mishmash

Nostalgia fans should watch between 5pm and 6pm today. 🤓 #BBCNewsChannel20 pic.twitter.com/aR6OzvwBMN

— Nick Buckley (@njb) November 9, 2017