7 O'Clock News on BBC Three

Key problems with LN. It was very expensive (you might argue it had lost its way a bit too with endless expensive satellite link ups to LA that really didn't add much) but also when the government looked at the figures on what BBC3 was doing (and there's an entire department in the Beeb devoted to churning out this kind of thing) the daily half hour of LN really made the channel look like it was obsessed with Celebrities. So it had to go.
You may argue that LN was obsessed with taking the mick out of the insane world of Celebrity. But the choice rested with the government and they look at figures. They don't look at actual programmes.

I'm in the BBC Three age bracket (I think, just!) and am totally sick of hearing about so-called celebrities.

Liquid News was funny at times but this together with Celebdaq, So-and-So's Millions, and all the other celeb based drivel BBC Three used to come out with was just too much.

Give me comedy like Nighty Night and drama like Conviction any day over all that.

I still think what BBC Three needs is a travel programme like Rough Guide, The Big Trip, that sort of thing. Why don't they do them?

I'd hadly seen BBC News when it was at 7 but I watched it last night at the new time and throught it was quite a good show. I'll probably watch it more now that it's at 8.30.

The thing about Liquid News is that it wasn't that expensive on a "per programme" basis - in fact it was probably a cheaper half hour to produce than a lot of the comedy and drama. The reason it looked expensive was that there were over 250 editions of it every year, with repeats limited to "on the day", so it was a large chunk of the channel budget.

Now the channel often repeats the same - often excellent when you see it for the first or second time - dramas and comedys, and factual shows - but they do get repeated an awful lot. The cost of making them may be a lot higher than a single Liquid News, but they may only make 10 or 20 episodes and then repeat them on 5 or 10 days, so they look much cheaper as their single editions fill much more air-time than Liquid News did.

I think quite a few members of the production team were shocked - but not surprised when it was axed.

It is true that Liquid News took a sizable chunk of the channel budget (between 5 and 10% I believe - I think closer to 5%) and it was axed as the channel had its budget cut.

However Liquid News wasn't that expensive on a "per show" basis - it was just an extremely big commission (5 or 6 shows a week for 50 weeks of the year - so 250ish shows a year).

If you make 20 episodes of Body Hits or Trauma and repeat them all 5 or 10 times (on separate days), then they look a lot cheaper in terms of filling air-time than 5 or 10 different editions of Liquid News, even if each Body Hits costs more to maje than two or three editions of Liquid News... If you see what I mean.

I must admit I had never though of it in terms of how much 'reuse' you can get out of a programme - as you say, very limited for LN. I do remember for both Have I Got New for You and Drop the Dead Donkey they kind of got round that by preceeding the programme with a voice over explaing when that particular repeat first aired and what the topical issues at the time were.

I did like LN and Celebdaq (Where is Libby Potter?) which was in a similar mould. It appears the BBC3 news show is moving to a similar kind of feel - slightly tongue in cheek is the best way I get describe it.

Eddie might be on holiday from BBC3 News, but he's still doing PM on R4 this week.

Libby has been Entertainment reporting for BBC Three News, and doing the Liquid News loops, when Emma Jones (also ex-Liquid News) has been doing other stuff.

Well it was good of George Alagiah on the Six to plug the "7 O'Clock News on BBC Three". I didn't realise it took so long for news to travel at BBC News.

Classic.

Personally I prefer Paddy to the other guy (can't remember his name), I think they should have stopped liquid news when Christopher passed away, as he was liquid news.......

Paddy will be commentating on the Eurovision song contest semi final from Kiev.