Election 2005 -Pre-Election discussion here

It's extremely unlikely that full-time politicians are ever paid for appearing on television and certainly not news items. Unless you're the leader of a political party who is presenting Have I Got News For You , of course...

Yep. The only people I was aware of were Diane Abbot and Michael Portillo for their weekly appearances on the Daily Politics. Presumably any claims for travel expenses would come out of the MPs own budget/allowance, not the BBC's for booking them on a programme.

TV and radio programmes will often send a car to pick up a guest - especially if it's early in the morning or late at night.

Glad to see Adam Boulton is presenting the Blair on the Spot programmes, or at least the first ones.

I hope Sky's election graphics are not linked to the standard political graphics that they are used - and are using for this show. They've been using them for a few years now, and they're interesting but not exactly spectacular.

I wonder if (as has been mentioned by Cat) the graphics will be changed for Sky News when the election is called on Monday or Tuesday? If last time is anything to go by, the election graphics were a hint as to what the current set would be like so It would be interesting to see if the self same thing happens again.

Although I hope Sky try to use something other than virtual-o-rama for this election as I tend to think that concept looks a bit dated.

Should the Pope die on Monday, when it is expedected the election will be called, do you think the Prime Minister would delay that at all, it would really mess up the media coverage of both events.

well i am hoping tony doesn’t clash with james hatt's appearance on breakfast. it would ruin my week.

I'm tempted to believe that they'll just retouch the current set - because they seem quite keen on them, for some reason - and there won't be as big an effort as 2001, but then again it might be easier to create a whole new set of graphics from scratch than just work within the grounds of the existing ones.

Either way, they'll have to do something... if they're as colour conscious as last time then they'll have to rethink it a lot... blue background, red live bug, red straps, and so on.

Should be interesting, either way.

There is a BBC News Special on BBC ONE 10am-11am to cover Blair's expected announcement of the election call.

It will be interesting to see if we see any changes today to pres on the news channels, for instance will Sky change over to new gfx sometime today, most probably the TOTH after Blair has announced the election, like they did in 2001. News 24 might use gfx simular to the modified TOG gfx they used during the local/euro elections last year, which is just changing the colours to indicate the party being covered.

Are we sure this kind of thing is going to happen?

Surely if a news channel has used a particular set of graphics (BBC: red/black, Sky: red/white, ITV: blue/yellow) for the last 2 years, they can't be accused of bias for continuing their pres sets after Blair's announcement.

I thought the announcement of the BBC's election presentation being reworked for "too much red" referred only to the "Vote 2005" night graphics, not necessarily for the days running up to the election. Anyway, we'll see in the next few hours- if they don't change today, there's no justification for 'change to avoid perceived bias' in the coming days.

I suppose Sky could just reload their 2001 set- they only used them for a few months last time.

I believe there was a cheeky preview of the BBC election (or what we can now assume will definitely be referred to as "VOTE 2005", thanks to the N24 ticker) graphics on Breakfast this morning; although half an hour later, they had hastily rearranged the graphics with no hint of the election graphics. See below:

http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/vote2005preview.jpg

...and for anyone taking notes of such things, here's a sneaky peeki at the BBC's set overlooking Parliament for the election announcement (and presumably for other roles as well...):

http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/vote2005studio.jpg