I don't understand the big love of this set, particularly the very odd comments that this is the best regional news set in the country....
Through no fault of the BBC Midlands Today team, the set is way too small for it to be the 'best in the country'. I agree they have tried to do the most they can with such a small space.
I also disagree that those silly little plasmas look better than the newsroom backdrop lightboxes. The animation is only slightly visible on the screens in the fake newsroom, which in my opinion does not justify the use of them. The wide shots in particularly look awful because the set is fundamentally an array of solid colour light boxes. They should have taken a leaf out of South Today, Look East and Look North's books and gone with one larger ''plasma' at the side for story images and down-the-lines, because really, is anything other than the newsroom backdrop going to be displayed on the rest of them?
Music is also a bit of a mess. I'm glad they've gone back to using the old 2008 music which is much nicer than the stranges beepy-noise of the South East Today titles (particularly the headline bed), but then why have they kept the close the same? Naturally this is something minor and may very well be fixed soon.
The titles are a bit of a let-down too. It's a shame they didn't do what North West Tonight did and create their own look but keeping within the brand. The reason it looks particularly odd is because the last four images don't move with the white pulsating rings. Hard to explain but take the middle shot where it spins - the image spins with the rings, whereas the following four shots don't move with the rings as they should.
The images are very odd - a road sign? a girl on a swing? horses? carpets? What have they got to do with the Midlands? That's what I hated about the 2002 look across the regions - focusing on people doing things rather than the region itself. It looks cheap. Can anyone elaborate as to what the second to last image actually is?
The Midlands seems to have a history of choosing some very odd images for their titles. For a while they had a strange obsession with cooling towers, featuring
twice in the 2002 - 2004 titles and then was bizarrely
a main feature in the 2007 titles. On those 2007 titles, who on earth chose those as 'landmarks' of the Midlands? Some old people having a chat, old people walking, aerial shots of nothingness and a shot of a half-price sale. Come on BBC! The midlands is more than that!