BBC News Channel: Presentation

I know a lot of it is to do with antiquated kit - London has old kit running, Birmingham's gallery is 9 years old and Nottingham's is some of the first digital kit installed in the regions (1998) - whereas Look Hull have VizRT and a newish gallery, as do Look East West, so you get better quality, tider graphics there - rather than sampling and recreating them in Aston CGs or Clarity kit.

Why does London use old kit, considering they recently moved to Broadcasting House?

In the north west, I think we've been lucky with the Salford move meaning they have better access to more standardised, cleaner graphics. Although, the 2007 look showed how NWT could use their creative skills whilst keeping within the main brand. 2008 ruined that and we ended up with inferior graphics.

NWT had some decent kit and a new gallery at NBH, that's now been reallocated I understand (BBC South or North Leeds) - VizRT etc for the graphics, just didn't get the 2008 viz coding for animation, so was static. I adored the 2007 NWT look, and hat off to Gareth Price for making it look fantastic (double hat off for his recent work at NWT).

London took a lot with them when they left MHS as their studio was a temporary set up.

Interestingly Birmingham and MT have VizRT capability, being the training base - but don't use it on air because most of their equipment, though digital, isn't good enough - time for a refit I think!

Those look quite bad, using a name/location aston to display the copyright date!

Though presumably in the case of Look East West they are restricted based upon capabilities at Norwich. After all you need some consistency within a programme.

I might have asked this question before but when BBC News 24 came from N9, where did BBC World come from? And why didn't News 24 just move to wherever World came from, so World could carry on using N9?!

Ah, well BBC World didn't move anywhere. They were 'joint' weekends. Basically what happened is News 24 moved into N9 and produced both channels' output for each weekend. So, at the top of every hour the N24 presenter, seated in N9, would read a "BBC News" bulletin (using the overnight headlines vamp and titles) which went out on both N24 and World. Once World went to their own recorded programming at the bottom of the hour, N24 would carry on with its own output from N9, branded "BBC News 24". During certain hours - like those clips - BBC World had short 5-minute news summaries followed by a 50-minute documentary rather than a full 25-minute bulletin. Then what happened was News 24 produced its own N24-branded output from N9, as demonstrated by those clips. As I didn't quite have 24-hour access to BBC World at that time (I had a permanent satellite dish installed in 2002) I can't remember what they did about their 5-minute news summary. I'm guessing it was done from CSO? At a later stage, I think BBC World started using N6 instead, but I'm fairly sure that didn't happen in 2001.

So, it must have been very strange viewing for the BBC World audience. Suddenly, they would see all sorts of unusual faces for a weekend. Some were probably more familiar, such as Philip Hayton, Maxine Mawhinney, Peter Coe, etc. But then they'd get the likes of Chris Lowe and Anna Jones in the evening, or Bill & Sian with Breakfast! In fact, I'm almost certain I have some clips of Breakfast coming from N9 during a later joint weekend. Let me have a dig around and if I can find them I'll upload them.

Here we are... a selection of clips from the joint weekend in the run-up to the December 2003 overhaul of BBC News. I *think* this joint weekend was to allow the N24 desk to be removed from N8 and taken to TC10 ready for the few months of CSO-loveliness.

Breakfast from N9:
Bill Turnbull & Sian Williams

BBC News from N9 (broadcast on both News 24 and World):
Peter Sissons - Intro
Peter Sissons - Closing - somewhat typical of his time on News 24
Susanna Reid

BBC News 24 from N9 (broadcast on N24 only):
Mike Embley & Anna Jones
Tim Wilcox

You asked in another thread about the second incarnation of The World Today. Here's a few clips I did of an early broadcast with Lindsey Brancher and Sara Coburn in 2001:
Intro
NIBs & Coming Up
Headlines
Closing

By the way, I also have loads of BBC News 24 and BBC World clips from 2002-2004, so if anyone would like me to upload a selection do let me know.

EDIT - I should say that some of the clips above were not captured by myself. They were captured by a former member here called Re-it-er-ate. Since he is no longer an active member here, hopefully it's acceptable for me to upload them.

Very very interesting clips there, thank you very much indeed!

You say you have clips from 2002-2004 World/N24 and ask if anyone would be interested for you to upload them? Yes please, do that!

Haha, OK - I'll select some typical bulletins from each channel and upload the intros/coming up/headlines etc. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have kept any 'normal' N24 bulletins from the 2001-2002 period. I do have some 2003 clips for N24 and lots after the December 2003 relaunch. For BBC World, I have lots from 2003 and lots from post-December 2003! So, plenty for me to choose from.

That's no problem. Personally I always preferred the post-December 2003 to the 2001-2002 look for BBC News, even though I did like the 01-02 era as well. In which case, I'll look forward to seeing your uploads!

Interesting to see a branch of WH Smith outside TVC Stage Door in that clip!
(There's a WHS inside the building now - perhaps it was being renovated at the time?)