BBC Breakfast

Erm I thought the reason Breakfast was moved to Salford was due to reductions across the BBC in staff numbers meaning too few positions had been moved to Salford and therefore to qualify for the grants or funding they could realise they needed to move another department or production to Salford and then Breakfast was identified as a suitable candidate (based on whatever criteria they were using).

I gather it was both. Salford had too few people and BH had too many. They killed two birds with one stone.

The black floor and ceiling is exacerbating the smallness and making it look smaller, in a taller walled set that wouldnt be a problem. Everyone with an ounce of sense knows that if you want a room to feel bigger you paint it white... and suggesting they do this is no different than any of the other suggestions made by other members. Painting the ceiling white instead of black is a no brainer in wanting to make it feel taller. N8 has a white ceiling with black lighting rigs and there is no sense of it being intrusive.

The fact is they are not going to do anything to that set for a good few years, because as you say, any major changes would require they move out for a week or more.... and likely by that time everyone will have gotten used to it.

Not so. There's many factors in choosing which colour schemes make rooms feel big/small, but in the end, they all boil down to the usage of the space.

Black is the standard background colour for studios / theatres / venues / clubs, because it absorbs light, and doesn't reflect back how big the space is. It's much harder to see how far up the ceiling is in a dark room with a black ceiling than it is if that ceiling is white.

The main reason houses are painted in bright colours is to bounce the light around, meaning you need fewer/smaller windows and light sources. Bouncing light is something that is carefully avoided in studios where you want to be able to control what light is on which areas of the space.

The problem with black surfaces is when they stop being the background, and become the foreground, like in the opening swoop shots we're seeing. If they reversed it and came up from ground level, still with the same percentage of set / ceiling, the roof would probably seem much higher to a casual glance. Making a small space look big is a challenge, one which can become almost insurmountable if you want to have moving & dynamic shots.

Finally, one thing which affects how large a room seems more than colour / lighint is how tall the ceiling is. A small room with a high ceiling can often look much bigger to the eye than a large room with a low ceiling. Something which certainly is working against the NWT studio!

BH didn't have too many people until the decision was made to move Vision in, we were told this was because of the intention to dispose of all of the White City Media Village buildings along with TVC. At the same time, the decision to sell Henry Wood House was also confirmed - taking several hundred more desks away from the W1 campus that would have been available for non-broadcast roles that could live with being across the road from BH.

This hasn't just impacted breakfast. WS technical teams have been kicked out the building, News Future Media no longer have most of their desks, BBC Media Action (nee World Service Trust) have also lost out. I'd estimate 60-80 of these desks got shifted to Broadcast Centre in White City - one of the building earmarked for disposal.

The intention of the redeveloped Broadcasting House was to bring together all of UK and international newsgathering for radio, television and online in one building for the first time. The decision to put Vision (a non-news division) in the building means that some of these teams are about to (or already have) become further away from each other than they ever have been before.

You mean it's a typical bureaucratic, messed-up, car-crash of a balls-up by BBC management? Well there's a big surprise.

I'm Irish and as such, I don't pay the UK licence fee (although I do pay for the reception of BBC services). But if I were a licence fee payer I would be quite annoyed at what I see as an inefficient use of resources. I know the details of it all are a bit sparse here and we're not aware of the full picture. But none of the reasons that we've heard so far for Breakfast being where it is make any business sense.

Why is the BBC's flagship morning news programme being broadcast from a tiny oblong converted office when there are real studios being rented by the same organisation in an adjacent building? Does Newsround really require a full-size studio for its 5-minute morning news updates? Couldn't it be in a CSO studio, or indeed the NWT studio? Why are studios being allocated to individual departments for their exclusive use? How does that serve viewers?

Even if you ignore for a moment the mess that Bvsh House has described above, with the game of musical chairs being played due to political interference and constrained resources, and accept that Breakfast had to move to Salford no matter what, surely there must have been a better way for the programme to make use of the facilities there.


How is it vastly superior to TC7/ N6? Bear in mind we're talking studios here, not sets. In any case, as you've mentioned BH, talking about TC7 and N6 is a bit redundant, as they're not where Breakfast would have been if it had moved to BH with the rest of News.


N8 and N9 work as converted-office-space-type studios as they retain some actual office space. Without wishing to go on about my hatred of CGI newsrooms (about which I've already started a whole thread), the trade off in N8 & N9 is clear: you get a low-ceilinged studio in which wide shots never look great and the whole thing feels slightly cramped, but the payoff for that is that you're broadcasting from a real, working newsroom. The low ceilings feel natural, as it's not supposed to look like a TV studio, it's supposed to look like a newsroom.

Obviously such a setup wouldn't suit Breakfast but I think what they have now is the worst of both worlds: a converted-office studio with a fake office backdrop.


Hmmm, looks a tiny bit higher to me. But anyway, the real newsroom backdrop and atrium outside will more than make up for that, I'd imagine.


People love change when it's for the better. Look how impressed everyone is with the BH renders.


A brand new studio complex, a chance to start afresh and all the opportunities for improvement that brings. I think your expectations are too low, especially if, unlike me, you're paying that licence fee.

Although it would be better for Breakfast to come from a 'proper' studio, IMO the fact that it comes from a small studio does make it seem more cosy and closer to a living room.

Plus DrewF's brilliant mock (http://www.tvforum.co.uk/thegallery/bbc-breakfast-salford-studio-idea-32372/)comes from a low ceiling and quite small studio and works incredibly well.

Actually no, it's forced some difficult decisions to be taken sooner rather than later - and so means the BBC benefits from the savings faster.

For example, I mentioned WS people from Bush House 'loosing' their W1 desks to Vision. If inconveniencing those hundred or so people has meant the disposal of a big building (Media Centre and/or White City 1) became possible that wasn't previously, then it's probably worth it. It's not as though ending up in one of the buildings on/around Great Portland Street is going to add much extra travel to your day. Even Broadcast Centre and TVC are only about 15 minutes away on the shuttle bus.

Give it all 5 years to settle down, and it will all come good. But right now property strategy is looking like a horrible set of compromises, because it's not entirely clear what the final position is.

Which one is the Media Centre again? How old is it and how separate is it from the Broadcast centre?

Are they planning to dispose of the massive White City building itself too?

Media Centre has Starbucks in it and is different to BC.

Media Centre and Broadcast Centre share an underground car park, I think that's pretty much it. All the building services (heating, power etc.) come from the Energy Centre IIRC - hence the name.

I've heard White City 1 is supposed to be fully vacant next year. It's not as big as you think either, it may even have the fewest desks of all three buildings thanks to its horrible internal layout.