BBC National News: Presentation

Ha!

I'll tell you what I did do - I stuck my fingers in the grill at the front of the desk where the microphones and other cables were fed through and got them stuck. Rather embarrassing, as my tour was with Peter Dorling, head of news.

I felt like a right fanny.

This evening's six o'clock news weather was different: the presenter stood further away from the screens so they didn't look as small as they used to. It looked a lot more like they have on the one o'clock news. It seemed to work very well too.

I think the weather looks better when the presenter is small, or when there is no presenter on screen at all. The weather takes far too long on the News Channel. Counted a 2 hour one for McElwee, although he might have made me fall asleep for a bit.

Feel a bit for Huw tonight, scooted out to Basra, obviously intended to be a tour de force on the Iraq withdrawal only to be scuppered by other events.

Mark Austin's in the same boat on ITV, and I would expect Gavin Esler will be similarly 'shunned' on Newsnight.

The nature of breaking news.

EDIT: I retract the 'Newsnight' bit - looks like too much effort has gone into this special episode for a bit of flu to spoil.

I've always thought having a huge map towering above a weather presenter, such as on the Six, or on Sky News always looks silly, as they generally can't point at anything north of Derby. LiveTV had the right idea by putting their weather dwarf on a trampoline so he could bounce up to Scotland.

DOG'd BBC One bulletin at lunchtime - the BBC News logo appeared at the start of the first report. Hope this was a mistake.

Edit (18:25) - seems it was - no DOG on the 6pm bulletin.

The text on the second line of the lower-third straps seems to be smaller on tonight's Ten, like some of the local news programmes and unlike the usual oversized News 24 style. Looks much tidier.

I noticed that the text seemed different as well but appears to be back to normal on the news channel now

They also didn't animate on screen from the left, they just faded on. Also the Locator aston displaying the place name kept disappearing when they were coming on screen.

From what people in the know have posted here before, I believe the astons are done a different way during the 1 and 10. Rather than coming from the same machine that does the ticker, there is a second Viz which goes through the vision mixer.

BBC One takes its feed from N6 straight from the mixer, the NC takes the mixer output with the main Viz output added downstream. So they do astons from the second Viz, fed into the vision mixer, so they appear on both the NC and BBC One, and the main downstream mixer adds the ticker for the NC only.

So it would appear that the second Viz was outputting the wrong format.

Well, can you believe it's ten years ago today that we said goodbye to those fantastic orchestral BBC news themes of the virtual era and David Lowe's themes first hit the air. Although it may have been a breath of fresh air at the time, Lowe's music was simply nothing compared to its predecessor. However, it's come a long way over a decade and I have to say, I've quite taken to the current BBC news theme.