BBC News: Nations & Regions

It would not necessarily need any doing on the presenter's part. In the gallery there would be a countdown clock, which will count down to the opt back or to the end of the programme, it would be the responsibility of the audio or vision mixer to hit the play button when there are 2 mins remaining, sort of like on Ready Steady Cook, with the 1min cue for the music to play. With the music on playout but not faded in, the presenter can finish and then the music can be faded up, and the studio mics pulled down, leading to a neat closure, and a cue for the ending VT (or in BBC London's case, the strap wipe on, or VT depending on how drunk the vision mixer is that day) What a shambles BBC London can be, my god they must be on very low pay to get it so bad sometimes...

The two minute end close is not used by many regions at all AIUI. Apart from the fact that it's rather upbeat, most regionas end on national headlines now that the Six recap has been ditched. To have such a bangin' tune running through that end sequence wouldn't be right particularly when it might be Chinese Earthquake/Burma Cyclone pictures that you're running. The shorter close is rather more traditional in style so a lot of regions have chosen to run that or even just a sting at 5" on programme.

Running any prefaded closer is relatively straightforward, you just have to remember to run it at the appropriate point. Normally the director would call "Run VT-1" etc. but often for an end closer, the PA calls it (as they're counting to shut-up and/or off air anyway).

The problem with backtiming very long closers comes when you've got limited playout lines. If you tie one of them up for a whole two minutes at the end of a programme it can reduce the number of lines for everything else to such an extent that doing a headlines sequence becomes difficult or even impossible.

I could see Look East using the 2 minutes end piece sometimes over possibly viewer pictures. Though whether they would use the whole 2 minutes I'm not sure.

I noticed BBC Spotlight showed a BBC South Today report on last nights programme, was about Dorset Police funding for the Olympic Games sailing events in Weymouth & Portland. I've not seen them use a BBC South report before...

Plymouth and Southampton's patches overlap a little bit with Weymouth and the surrounding area of Dorset. Report sharing between South and South West therefore is generally confined to this part of the country only, so therefore is occasional rather than common. It's far more common for Southampton to share reports with Tunbridge Wells for Brighton stories and with Bristol for Swindon stories (though of course Oxford usually take such stories as part of their sub-opts, Southampton only take them when they're providing pan-region broadcasts).

BBC Points west opted out of the one show, for an hour long special, about Bristol Citys big match at wembley. With 4 presenters in total, 3 of them live on location!

They seemed to be sharing the same Wembley live location with BBC Hull? Certainly it appeared to be the same ramp at Wembley Way; also there appeared to be no overlap in coverage, i.e. neither was live from Wembley at the same time as the other!

North East & Cumbria just got the Yorkshire ident, with the announcer saying "This is BBC One in Yorkshire"

We've also got Yorkshire's news!

Well I got NE & Cumbria ident as normal.

Anyway, they managed to cock-up the coming up around 13:18, the presenter Colin Briggs said what was coming up for the region, 2 highlights featured as normal, but we were treated with the headline bed for a good 20 seconds I'd say, the VT froze half way through. Then it zoomed into the studio with Kate as normal.. strange.

I wonder what was up with my TV. I got the Yorkshire Ident, and the coming up. However, downstairs my Sky television showed normal Look North. Strange..

Yep - long prefades can be a real problem on some playout systems - particularly one of those in use in both network (widely) and the regions (not many). The most common way of configuring this system for running order linkage only allows one VT to be "on-air" at a time. If you ran a VT after the pre-fade was running it would stop the pre-fade from running. There is a way round this by using a separate schedule with a dedicated server port for the prefade (which network use) - but most regions don't have enough server ports for playout to do this.

As a result a short prefade, a sound only prefade (fired manually by the sound person - if there is one...) or a non-prefade close, is used in these areas.

Prefades can be very useful though - particularly if they are interesting enough to absorb the odd timing underrun...

I expect the 2"00' close was produced for special events and the like. Midlands Today is one region where they dont do a headline recap at the end so it in theory could work for regions that often end with the presenters adlibbing etc. Indeed it is a very upbeat mix and it is a shame its not used atall by any regions AFAIK.