BBC News: Presenters & Rotas

One thing I never got about UK news why certain presenters only really present four days a week. Are they off the fifth day or working behind the scenes? Seems like it would be easier (and require less presenters) having the main ones present M-F and have the weekend anchors report and fill in the rest of the week.

They're mostly off on the 5th day.

They're generally contracted to do a certain number of hours - bear in mind that most of said presenters will have been working away either before/after the programme doing research/preparation - it's quite possible that they work a full week's hours over the four days. That would not be uncommon in the industry.

Martine is on tonight.

I know. Martine Croxall on a Monday.

The other issue as well as that it's not always in broadcasters' interest to have one big name that works every day and then a bunch of reserves who are very much second bananas, because it means when the big name leaves there isn't a massive chasm which you have trouble filling. It also makes it look more like a team affair so when Fiona Bruce does the Ten it doesn't look like Huw can't be bothered and not much has happened, so you needn't bother watching, because Fiona is an established presenter in her own right.

You'll see it with Breakfast again soon, when Billy leaves it won't be a disaster because the other presenters are all well-established in their own right and viewers know and trust them, which wouldn't happen if they were just popping up on odd days when Billy was off.

I noticed Geeta usually does 3 days per week on the 8am shift. Does it mean the extra 1 hour on that time slot makes up for the fourth day?

On another note, strange to see Rico change to being seated throughout the last hour of Newsday today. Very reminiscent of the old studio.

My mum works three days a week, because the contract agreed between her and her employers specifies she can work three days a week. Other people at the company work four or five days a week, but she doesn't. She is paid accordingly.

Of course, in many cases, the programme makers prefer to have a team of presenters and don't want the same people on all the time. It is entirely up to individual programmes who presents and when.

Not to mention, that getting up presumably a fair few hours earlier than 8am isn't going to be the nicest thing for the body clock. Work-life balance: it may well be that the BBC allow certain employees such conditions in order to improve their productivity when they are in work...

I wasn't meaning to say it was specific to Geeta. I also noticed back in the days with Nik Gowing, it's usually Nik for 3 days and Geeta takes the remaining 2 days. Now that Nik has retired, Geeta moves to take over Nik's role and does 3 days. So it would seem the 8am shift which I think is the only 4-hour shift as someone clarified before, would have a slightly shorter number of presentation days for a given main presenter, compared with the norm of other shifts (ie. 4 days for a main presenter and 1 day for the alternate presenter). Of course, this is in the context of the weekday news.

Mariko Oi is co-presenting Newsday from Singapore.

But that 8am shift contains 5 or 6 bulletins. So, shorter hours but equal or more on-air hours to some of the shorter shifts which are spread across 4 days per week.

In fact, David Eades and Geeta currently share that shift (although today its Adnan Nawaz), and I understood that David did 3 days and Geeta 2?