BBC regional news - Now with added Reith

No they don't, quite the opposite in fact. The RAJAR website doesn't list BBC Surrey and BBC Sussex separately but, along with Three Counties Radio, they traditionally have the lowest reach of all BBC Local Radio stations outside of the big city stations. I think that's largely due to the wider choice available on FM, with most of the London stations audible as well as our own local stations.

There is kind of a parallel here with BBC Local Radio here - if people think the Reith rollout is slow, the rollout of the second Mcasso jingle package has been going on since 2015 and still hasn't quite made it round the whole network - BBC Sussex and BBC Surrey seem to be holding out against it, and there seems little likelihood of them adopting it any time soon seeing as they recently changed their news jingle back to a slightly rehashed version of the one they had from 2010-14. BBC Hereford and Worcester is the only other area still airing the old jingles.

I tend to think if you're going to have a common theme across a network, then either implement it fully, or don't bother at all.

But back vaguely on topic, why does the BBC London News logo still not display the full title of the programme? The whole tri-media thing went a long time ago.

They do refer to it as BBC London mostly, with the occasional BBC London News

I've always assumed that it's because they don't want on-screen repetition of the word "News" (what with the red "BBC News" box beneath the local programme name). But the repeated "BBC" is fine, apparently...

This theory is seemingly supported by the fact that generic look mk1 (the Lambie-Nairn "maps", rolled out in 1999-2000) took the opportunity to drop the "...News" from the end of Spotlight short bulletins' name, and to revert back to the traditional "Points West" (rather than "News West" which had been adopted in the early 1990s). The "Newsroom South East" name presumably only survived at that point because of the fairly imminent planned break-up of that region.

Both "BBC London (News)" and "BBC Channel Islands (News)" lack the supposed final word in their logos, despite some/most/all listings (and/or verbal references) giving this as part of the programme name. This was also the case when South Today's Oxon/Bucks/Swindon sub-opt dabbled with autonomous "BBC Oxford (News)" branding for a while.

Let's never forget BBC LDN...

I always insisted on pronouncing that as "Bee Bee See Ludun". Because that's what it says.

I think in the case of Surrey there's the factor that it was one of the last local stations, launching a decade after its commercial rival and after the 'incremental' stations in London increased the choice.

It wasn't a success and has gone through lots of incarnations and formats, its never really got established. 3CR does better but that's also had several name and format changes

Back to BBC London, their attitude to the outside London areas has always been an odd one Originally they had area reporters who looked after a particular patch, but they were inconsistent - Essex and Hertfordshire had their own, but the other two were South London and West London, who presumably included Surrey and Berkshire, not that anything in Surrey ever got covered

Sussex and Kent they didn't cover as that is Tunbridge Wells patch, even the bits that saw London News, though they sometimes used one of their packages. But Hertfordshire was super served because not only did it have it's own correspondent, but a lot of the editorial staff relocated from Elstree so lived in Hertfordshire

Why would you pronounce BBC as the letters but not LDN? Be consistent and say "Buh-Buhc".

Look East has also updated its website, including the West edition...

Also several commercial stations based just outside the M25 have pretty healthy Rajar figures, despite most of the London stations being available on the dial. I'd agree that BBC Surrey/Sussex being somewhat late to the party, plus the rebrand to BBC Southern Counties Radio and back again is more to blame for their poor showing than the amount of competition from London stations.




I did read somewhere recently that BBC Local Radio stations may be allowed to have their own jingle packages again, although that might just be a rumour.

I can't understand why stations would hold back from updating to the second Mcasso package. On the whole it's so much better than the first which I thought was terribly twee. That said, the strained sounding 'Beee Beee Ceee' vocals which have been added to the second packaged are awful.

It doesn't help that Surrey is one of the few areas where the commercial opposition is still more local than the BBC station - Eagle is the one of the last remaining heritage ILR stations that hasn't become part of a national network and is still local all day, though how much longer that will continue, now it has been bought by Bauer, remains to be seen. Whereas, if you tune to BBC Surrey, for all but four hours a day, you'll be hearing programmes from BBC Sussex in Brighton.



I think that may have been speculation following Tony Hall's speech in 2017 on the 50th anniversary of BBC Local Radio, that each station would be allowed to regain a level of autonomy that had since been lost? Some thought that may extend to the return of individual jingle packages, but there's so far been no indication that that will the case.

Sussex and Surrey is largely still Southern Counties Radio, just with split branding.