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

Yes - however the two screen grabs in question are clearly the same camera offering the same shot (albeit one is a tiny bit tighter than the other) and Sarah and Gavin are looking at it and reading to it...

No real concept of 'fair use' in UK broadcast law as far as I'm aware.

There is 'fair dealing' - where you can use content for quotation, criticism or review, or reporting current events. In all three cases you need to credit the original authors and/or owners of the work (usually by use of an on-screen credit). (If ever you see a director or writer credited on a film clip, chances are it is being fair dealt and hasn't been purchased as a clip)

You also have to run past legal in most cases - to ensure you aren't going to cause issues elsewhere in the BBC which may have an existing contract with the material's owner.

Or you could do what News do which is ignore all this...

Sport coverage is covered by separate agreements and not fair dealt usually.

Though it looks as though the second sequence that I've highlighted here was edited at some point after launch - the third-to-last flag is different in the clean sequence that was shown before 6pm on Thursday.

Version shown last week
Version from June 1998



There's also the generic BBC News titles that were used on the overnight simulcasts. See here and here

Though they seem to have been taken out of the search database even though they still exist on the archive.

It's still a decade's worth of off airs, as I say the answer 'we've lost the programme' isn't applicable any more like it was in 2001

I don't think the shot is tighter, I think it's that the off-air recording is 14:9 letterbox in a 4:3 frame as that's how it went out initially to cable viewers. This has then been cropped to 16:9 (and seemingly distorted a little, stretched as not to cut off the clock perhaps?)


Here is the off-air screengrab with the distortion corrected and overlaid onto the clean 16:9 screengrab.



(Apologies for anyone bored by this forensic investigation into News 24 presentation of 1997)

Very good point. Though the NTL cable feed and BBC One feed was 14L12 (i.e. 16:9 letterboxes to 14:9 in a 4:3 frame) with no stretch, only crop and shrink.

I always wondered why BBC News 24 was in 16:9 from day one, doesn't really seem to make much sense. It's not like anyone could watch it that way until digital launched nearly a year later, none of the news packages would have been 16:9, or the programmes they showed on the channel, and the regular news bulletins were still in 4:3 for nearly 3 years after the channel launched. I can understand them wanting it 16:9 capable and ready, but it seems to me it would have made more sense to keep it in 4:3 and flick the switch later, possibly the same time the regular bulletins did.

Our cable service (Diamond Cable/NTL) switched the aspect ratio quite early on too, some point in mid-1999 (definately pre-revamp) so it was just the 4:3 cut-out. Maybe the 14:9 feed got stopped around that time and they just rebroadcast the DTT or Astra feed?

While the footage that the BBC News Channel showed of the launch did look like 14:9 zoomed up to 16:9, it doesn't look like it was "off-air" as such, it was still clearly broadcast quality, not VHS.

Equally it made no sense building a new 4:3 studio, and given that 16:9 outlets were imminent, it made a lot of sense to build a 16:9 studio and to gain experience running a 16:9 news operation. Yes - you could have built a 16:9 studio then run it 4:3 for a bit - but you'd just be deferring the learning process... Far better to make mistakes when nobody is watching (that was pretty much the mantra for the first year or three of News 24 after all)


ARCing the output to 14L12 was hardly that tricky...

ISTR that the 14L12 feed for analogue cable ceased quite soon after the launch of DSat, DTT (and I think DCab) in Nov 1998 - almost exactly a year after launch, on the same day that News 24 moved from N9 to N8. (That was also the day that the 'National Regional News' opt-out fillers branded UK Today launched)

An amusing clip that sticks in my memory from the channel, around 1999-2000 (post-flags) is someone - possibly a comedian (Tim Vine?) - dropping a pen over the desk, climbing over the desk live on air and shouting "I'VE GOT THE PEN!! I'VE GOT THE PEN!!" while the newsreader awkwardly laughed next to him. Think it was on TV Home at some point recorded from an Auntie's Bloomers/Outtake TV type show.

Stuck in the mind because as a kid I didn't realise it was a comedian and thought it was just one of the regular newsreaders going completely insane on air.

It was Tim Vine. A funny clip, must be out there somewhere.

His other big funny moment on the channel was this interview:

AIUI they are still there - just a lot of people had their 'Archive' rights removed when they changed the access levels. Similarly people in BBC Studios who had access to ITV, C4 and C5 stuff on Redux lost that too.

That whole paper review (Was it Peter Coe presenting?) was hilarious - the jumping over the desk was just the culmination of it. I love that Tim Vine is Jeremy Vine's brother!