BBC North West Tonight coverage of Cumbria

I think it's inevitable that something has to give when you've got a large region which contains such important and densely populated conurbations as Manchester, Liverpool, Preston etc. Most of the news is going to be generated in those areas, compared to the more rural areas of the region. In terms of sport, again it's not surprising that so much time is given over to it due to the fact that we are one of, if not the, most fanatical sporting regions in the UK. In fact, NWT mentioned just this week that our region has the highest concentration of current Premier League football teams.

I can certainly understand the complaints about lack of coverage in other areas. I live between Liverpool and Manchester and we don't really get that much coverage either. I'm sure if you looked at the year on average, NWT is covering stories from Cumbria and the Isle of Mann. I know I've seen reports from the Lake District, Kendal etc over the years. They're just not featured all the time because bigger news stories are happening elsewhere in the region. It's not dissimilar to Granada which at one point (maybe still) covered parts of North Wales and you would get the occasional story from there featured. It's just a consequence of having fairly large, densely populated TV regions.

It's a common complaint, the Yorkshire version of Look North is known as "Look Leeds" by people in certain parts of the patch. In certain respects you're making the case for Local TV - the existing regions are too big to be able to cover every part of the region every day, but covering smaller areas in more depth requires more resources.

That said in these days of belt-tightening, it would make a lot of sense to do more on the edge of the region because of the opportunity to share reports with the neighbouring region.

Cumbria is probably short changed by both the BBC and ITV currently, but heck, there is always That's TV!

I would say that it's not just a North West/East problem...

The same could be said for various parts of Scotland that are served by STV North that should actually be served by STV Central.

There are two streets in a very small village called Gilmerton just outside Crieff, one street is served by STV North and the other is served by STV Central. Try and figure that one out.

Apparently it's to do with the hills blocking the signal coming from the Crieff relay which puts out STV North so it has to come from the Blackhill Transmitter which puts out STV Central, but problems like this with the wrong STV region are definitely paramount in some spots.

STV only has four regions:

* STV Glasgow
* STV Edinburgh
* STV North which has 6min opt out for Tayside or Aberdeen and Inverness.
* STV2 does have extra bulletins but mainly cover those areas.

Thankful ofcom forced ITV to reinstate Look Around yet it does not include Berwick nor the Isle of man. I do agree Reporting Scotland is meh, but I think it would be better to start of having opt out? here is the question could BBC scotland have opt outs for certain areas within Scotland? The same goes for North west tonight?

Realistically sport is a massive part of the North West region and the reality is for the majority of viewers in that region an extra minute spent on the Premier League or Super League clubs is time and resources better spent than covering the most Northerly parts of the region.

Has an opt out ever been considered for BBC North West for the more Northern parts?

The North West region has the problem of only having one transmitter, so opt outs aren't possible.

In the 80s, Cumbria moved into the North West region, with some of the shorter bulletins coming from a basic self-op studio at Radio Cumbria on the Caldbeck transmitter only. This was not popular with viewers and eventually it was switched back to North East.

Before you go full Farage on us, please understand the history. These services were funded by a Foreign Office grant until relatively recently.

It's part of the BBC Charter. The government requires the BBC to provide these services, it's not really the BBC's choice.

Indeed. However the Lancaster 'relay' is now line fed, as is Kendal (that goes on to feed the other South Lakeland relays) so a north Lancs/South Cumbria sub-opt could be created. Very unlikely though, the total population served would be very small to be justifiable and viable.

The obvious split would be Grt/Manchester and Merseyside, but both areas are served by Winter Hill [1], and not much scope in that region for extra frequencies, (particularly with the 700 MHz clearance)

[1] Storeton relay covers bits of Merseyside, but not enough to not cause confusion

The foreign language services aren't for immigrants, they are for those who speak those languages abroad in their own countries

You obviously didn't look very far.


The US government funds several external radio services broadcasting in many languages via the Broadcasting Board of Governors:
Voice of America (in lots of Asian languages
Radio Free Europe (in lots of european languages
Radio y Televisión Martí (Spanish to Cuba)
Radio Free Asia (in several east Asian languages)
It even funds an Arabic language TV station for the Middle East: Al Hurra

The French government fund Radio France Internationale in 12 languages

The German government fund Deutsche Welle in 30 languages

There are lots of other publicly funded international broadcasters that broadcast in foreign languages, I remember listening to Radio Sweden's English service for example

It always used to be super-served by ITV

And there is France 24 on television, with English, Spanish, and Arabic services in addition to its French flagship.