BBC Parliament - Discussion

The Conferences shown are the formal Early Autumn gatherings.

The 'Spring Conferences' are relatively new and the format varies. My opinion is that any attempt at balanced Coverage with different formats would be difficult, hence they are currently avoided.

BBC has been put on Red Alert for an election - What will happen to BBC Parliament when an Elections called: what happened last time?

A large part of the morning on Parliament was made up of the various parties' press conferences.

In 2001 there was a 10 minute long remix of the News 24 countdown and other David Lowe BBC themes which was looped between the conferences.

It seems to have been a little overlooked in the general General Election discussions, but Parliament is showing itself as a handy extra channel for politics spods at the moment.

They've spent the mornings showing press conferences (live and repeated), extra showings of This Week, the Daily Politics, the Campiagn Show, and various other political programmes. They've also been dipping into live proceedings in other chambers: yesterday there was some NI Assembly, and they've just finished showing with a live session of the European Parliament.

I missed it last week, but they did a special programme for Prorogation which is still on iPlayer, and contains a discussion with Betty Boothroyd about hat-doffing.

The only problem is not knowing what's on when - the schedule does seem to be updated as and when, but an awful lot of it is listed just as 'Election Coverage' without too much detail of what to expect. They also seem to be quite good at filling time - anyone else remember the 10-minute countdown music from the 2001 election?

BBC Parliament have just shown a repeat of "How To Win The TV Debate"

It looked like an edited off air recording from the original BBC2 broadcast, because most of the end credits were cut out, and just before the cut point, the sound cut out and you can see the end credits jittering, so it looks like that they basically cut out the voiceover and credit squeeze.

Why was the programme shown like this?

Similarly, quite often with the replay section of BT vision, BBC programmes are often off air recordings of TV transmissions, with voiceovers and credit squeezes, together with DOGs for BBC Three and BBC Four programmes. This doesn't happen with any other broadcasters on BT vision on demand.

in the days before iplayer was rolled out fully the catchup on demand streams for BBC shows on virgin were taped off air, often with the ident before it too.

Isn't BBCP done by an outside company anyhow? Perthaps they don't have access to the playout servers at Red Bee.

It's played out by BBC News at Millbank these days. You'd have thought they'd be able to get hold of a tape, but I guess they were happy enough with an off-air recording.

What a great programme it was too - especially with all the behind the scenes footage and the explanation of Nixon's painful knee and so on.

If anyone hasn't yet seen it, I'd give it two thumbs up.

Was hoping they would use this music again but no such luck

Yeah I watched it on the recommendation of you guys - it was both fascinating and entertaining. Interesting to see the old cameras too with not exactly smooth zooming, and the audio problems and so on!

According to the EPG, Parliament will now be simulcasting the Dimbleby BBC One election programme on Thursday rather than the BBC Scotland election programme as was originally billed - anyone know why this has been changed? Seems a bit excessive to put it out when anyone who has access to BBCP will already be able to watch it on two other channels.

As an aside - three cheers for BBC Parliament this campaign. They've done a superb job of replaying all the campaign/election programmes at more convenient times, and all the debates too from around the country. It's done it's job superbly, much better than the last two elections when it's just tried to be a budget News 24 by putting on news conferences and general hustings-type stuff.

It seems that the EPG is incorrect - Parliament will in fact be showing the Scotland programme from 2155-0600, followed by TC1.