BBC News: Presenters & Rotas

So is Nicholas been moved to Saturday mornings?

It's normally seems to be Gavin Esler on weekend mornings since the schedule changes - I think Nicholas might be a relief presenter now rather than having the regular Sunday morning slot.

Rachel Burden, 5 Live Breakfast presenter, is down in the Radio Times as presenting Breakfast tomorrow.

Not the first time technically - she did a short post-election debate with Louise Minchin as a Breakfast/5Live simulcast.

She's confirmed this to be correct on Twitter.

I starting to think Gavin Esler is the relief presenter, with Nicholas during the weekend mornings.

Also the change over seems to be 6pm not 7pm since Clive Myrie took over the role at that time.

I thought Gavin had taken over Maxine Mawhinney's weekend morning shift, as he was there for Dateline London on Saturday morning, so it saved money for him to do both roles.

He did the BBC1 evening news yesterday, of which the early evening bulletin was at 6pm

So the weekend line up must be

10am - 2pm
2pm - 6pm
6pm - midnight?

Who that presenting now?

The line up is 2-7pm and 7pm-midnight

Maxine did Dateline yesterday (think it is first shown at 11.30am) and I don't remember her re-appearing after Clive. Maybe, heaven forbid, they let her go home early...

That would make sense considering it's usually the morning presenter (Gavin) who does Dateline during that shift. Makes me think the rota change was for Gavin's convenience rather than the separate Dateline shift having been absorbed into the morning shift as otherwise you'd have expected Nicholas Owen to do it, or for Maxine to have done the morning shift?

Surprising really that if you go back to about 2007 Gavin Esler had almost nothing to do with News 24 anymore (even Dateline was a World production wasn't it?) and has slowly become more closely aligned with it until now all of his regular BBC work, as far as I can tell, is Friday-Sunday on the NC. Quite a demotion compared to being one of 3 or 4 Newsnight presenters, and Chief Presenter of N24 before that? I wonder why he fell from grace with BBC producers when the likes of Martha Kearney and Jeremy Vine moved on to even greater positions from Newsnight? There must surely have been plenty of opportunities to move Gavin to radio (Radio 4 in particular), BBC One or even BBC World News and him remain a higher-profile presenter?

The apparent demotion of Ben Brown has also notable, though Simon McCoy on afternoons with Jane/Emily/Rebecca has made that slot watchable again for the first time since Jon Sopel left. I'm surprised Ben isn't given more BBC 1 slots though if he's lost any regular slot on the NC, when you consider Simon and Jane appear fairly often now and more recently Clive Myrie. And if Ben isn't viewed particularly highly as a presenter by the current crop of editors, I'm surprised he hasn't moved back to reporting which he's arguably better suited to.