Central News South Closure

Central South, trying to say "remember us as proper cake era Central, not the itv1 watered down version of Central"

Pendants' corner again : Berkshire still does exist as a county technically, because it still a English ceremonial county-- therefore a geographic county. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire and Map of English Counties for more on this.

Berkshire as an administrative county doesn't exist as you correctly observe-- because the county council was abolished in 1998. County council power was devolved to its constituent administrative districts, making them unitary authorities (with Newbury changing its name to West Berkshire).

In England, every UA was assigned to a geographic (or "ceremonial")county in 1996-- except for Stockton-upon-Tees which was bizarrely split between N.Yorks and Co Durham for some reason! Therefore Berkshire still exists to cover its six UA.

Effectively England has two sets of counties areas: Ceremonial counties, which are the geographical/ proper counties of England; they are used by the media, public, tourist agencies and the postal service (supposedly in the last case!). Then you have the administrative 'counties' of England: They consist of UA, county council areas and (arguably) metropolitan boroughs; these are used by the government, road atlases and OS maps.

BTW Berkshire used to cover a larger area, but the north western leg of the traditional Berks (the Wantage/Faringdon/Abingdon area) was given over to Oxfordshire in 1974-- logical since that area is right on Oxford's doorstep! The Ridgeway now forms the boundary between the two counties.

Hope that clears things up. I need to get out more

Central South: The End

that's lovely.

Course if I was directing, the light would go down, there'd be a proper central endcap, an it would cut to that testcard before going back to london

Do Meridian reports currently end with a "Meridian Tonight" pay-off on the reporter track? If so will they all have to do separate "Thames Valley Tonight" versions for packages shared between regions?

Although I'm thinking they already have to do that for "Meridian News" and "Meridian Tonight"?

I wouldn't be surprised if it was good old Wesley with his love of TV pres from years gone by. Even the Central website on itv.com mentions his love of it.

On the 8:05am GMTV pan-regional bulletin, the presenter said something along the lines of: "This is the last ever Central News for viewers in the South Midlands, the new Thames Valley service starts at 11:10am".

This overlooks the fact that it's only the eastern half (approx) of the ex-CNsouth that will be served by Thames Valley News! (and, in Herefordshire's case, they will still be getting a programme entitled "Central News")

Yes, I tuned in at 6.35 especially to see the new Thames Valley service and found Chris James, whos autocue was down and he ended up cutting the bulletin very short and the GMTV 'Continues Shortly' caption appeared for ages.

As stated above, Chris said in the 8.05 bully that this was the last Central News for the south midlanders. He said the same thing on Friday morning!

When did this go out? How come 'Studio 2' wasn't being used for a Meridian West News bulletin at the same time?

Is that Mark Lipscombe the Carlton continuity announcer?

Even if it was done live, remember that only two of the three Whiteley studios are now used at weekends since the Meridian South and South-East sub-regions now get the same bulletins.

Yes.

It certainly looked more like an "as live" than a "live" to me.