BBC News: Presenters, correspondent & rotas

Which kind of leads onto another question-What happened to 1 presenter doing both the 10-2 shift and Dateline London (since Gavin Esler used to do both when he was doing the Saturday 10-2 shift.) as i thought it saved the cost of needing a 2nd presenter on shift?

Shaun Ley is an excellent presenter of Dateline.

He's an excellent presenter, period.

Agreed. And he is an excellent presenter of Dateline!!!!!!!!

He’s on 2-7 this afternoon. I guess Carrie or somebody else did Dateline?

I wish Dateline would have the same presenter every week. The chopping and changing of presenters does the programme a disservice.

Carrie


Carrie is main presenter and does it most week, Shaun does it whenever she isn't available. Better than having a different presenter every week.

Dateline London was better in the early 2000s. It used to be presented from the set at Millbank and was hosted by Gavin Esler or Nik Gowing, pretty much without fail. It felt like something a bit different - I lost interest in it when it just became another debate from the regular BBC News Channel set. Back then it also used to run for pretty much a whole hour, minus a short news summary at the top of the hour. I think they used to edit it down for BBC World, if I remember correctly. Having a full hour really left plenty of time for discussion and debate.

I believe the old format was a 10 minute news summary, then 20 minutes for the UK only, a brief news update, and half an hour which was recorded and went out on World later. (I'd occasionally have lines record shifts at Red Bee where a compliance editor would sit and watch it in case anything needed cut for the repeat.)

I suppose it doesn’t really stand out any more. You can barely get by an hour of any news channel these days without them devoting too much time to various people of differing viewpoints arguing with each other.

Babita Sharma is back.

Not necessarily as she also presented breakfast as a one off a couple of months ago, so it may just be she is doing a handful of breakfast programmes during her leave.