East Midlands Today - New Set 29th March

Well I think it looks extremely smart and very much in keeping with current style in London, while retaining the sofa that EMT has been associated with for a very long time. Good job, well done I say.

One or two people from various stations in the US on periscope said they sometimes make the chairs uncomfortable to lay back on so the talent sits straight up.

I agree that presenting news from a sofa or a coffee table style desk (like ITV) looks odd from an American perspective.

Yeah, that's something I've noticed about US TV news programming, no sofas. Separate armchairs is a thing for soft areas, but sofas are not, not even in morning news. Everything's almost completely desk bound.

That's the whole idea. People slouching on a sofa does not look good on screen, at all. You only had to see the many [British] local TV stations initial news programmes that opted for sofas to see exactly how bad it can look.



They have only had a couple of days in the studio, give them time! The timelapse shows them putting other content on the screens, but I'm sure they'll want the time to actually rehearse using them like that before we see that happening on screen.

BBC Breakfast did experiment with a smaller sofa and some armchairs in 2002 (during the first days of the "Romanian Dentist's Waiting Room" set era). This the only pic I can find of the set . . . and the standard 2-seater sofa from DFS:



The drawbacks were either showing empty armchairs during wideshots most of the time, and/or having to move additional armchairs in if you had more than 2 guests.

I can see why they ended up with the large curved sofa as a more practical solution.

Credit to them as well for revamping the set over a long weekend. That's the way I remember it happening in the old days (well, the 90s) with news sets, not decamping to a temporary base for weeks whilst the set is switched out.

There was also the set a while after that one which had the infamous gap with flowers in between the two presenters (on a table maybe?) which was removed because viewers thought it got in the way.

Yes, that was such an odd design decision:

http://i68.tinypic.com/2njlk7a.jpg
(Sorry for pic quality - best I could find)

Whilst the flowers were in the background, that isn't the way they came across in close-ups.

When they removed the gap, they even made a point of commenting that viewers had found the flowers a distracting division.

I'm guessing that in the UK, viewers are now more comfortable with early morning TV from a sofa, which may explain why GMB moved much of their presentation to the soft area.

However, having said that, in the morning many people are just listening to the TV, rather than watching it. The same probably can't be said for an early evening local news magazine programme, which may look better from a desk?

EMT's set looks far better than Midlands Today's which appears too artificial. I'm surprised EMT is still a two-handed presentation in comparison to Birmingham's edition but they always work well together. How refreshing that Anne is on our left which is in contradiction to the "rules" about news presenters always having the male on the [our] left that have been mentioned in the press.

Has to be one of the best descriptions ever. LOL

Straight backs are quite common on UK 'TV' sofas. Most designers use similar seat-height and seat-depth measurements, though the height of the backs can vary a bit. (Most TV sofas are made by the same companies here too...)

As for the new screens - I'm not sure they are plasmas at all. Have a feeling they are LCDs (probably LED backlit). In some of the EMT shots they appear to be different colours - which could be because they have been colour-corrected differently - but with LCDs could also mean they are being shot at different angles (which is still an issue with LCD displays - as they change colour with viewing angle)

That description originates from then-presenter Jeremy Bowen, in a newspaper interview some years after he left Breakfast (and by which time Breakfast had since revamped at least once).