Your favourite BBC NEWS 24/NC set.

Agreed - although the fixed 'Westminster' CSO shot used for interviews on the news channel and some nationals is a close second, with the terribly low resolution of the image, that horrid washed out red lower-third background (which looks like it was supposed to be some kind of railing crossbar), and a general low quality feel all round.

However, it's certainly not as bad as Manchester - everyone always seems to have the most garish and obvious green glow around them.

Mm - I used a bad example with Manchester! What I was getting at was that the cameras in little studios generally look better than the ones in newsrooms because the backgrounds are not newsrooms. I agree totally that Manchester's set up needs some work (and that's putting it somewhat politely!)

It is. And it's unlikely to change until the move to Salford.

Is Manchester's not the self-op presentation studio which used to be used for Breakfast opts?

God they were terrible, as soon as the sting for Breakfast was played all you heard was a massive THUMP and the screen flickering into 14:9 mode. It didn't look too bad when they had a plain background but when they introduced the Oxford Rd background with the BBC News style window, it looked rather obvious.

Ah yes, the unforgettable THUMP. I have fond memories of watching Tina Bangs often struggling with the self-opting equipment during the Breakfast bulletins.

She often seemed to be struggling with something under the desk. Perhaps that had nothing at all to do with the opting, and it was just a colleague down there. Or maybe one of her love-eggs kept popping out.

The licence fee payers deserve to know about these things.

BBC LDN, the thing causing her trouble under the desk could have been an autocue pedal. On some of these shorter bulletins the presenter often operates the autocue by themselves.

Ha ha ha! Love eggs indeed!

The self-op desks were ingeniously complicated things that required a high level of multi-talking from the presenter. Conceived when bulletins comprised mainly of in-vision reads and stills, the presenter was required to put themselves on air, drive the autocue, cut to stills as appropriate and hit a cue-next type button when they were back in vision. When things got more complicated and video inserts and packages were added into the mix things got very exciting. Leeds had one of the last self-op desks in use as I understand it.

Ah, then perhaps it was that.

She really seemed to be struggling on some occasions though - it often seemed like she'd got her skirt caught in a shredder, for all the wriggling and kicking about.

I bet that took a lot of skill on the presenter's part. To be doing all those things that deejay mentions, as well as presenting, must have been a very difficult job indeed. Nigel Jay made it seem easy!

Certainly the last that was in use driven by the presenter, other regions retained them but driven by the director.

Somebody on here mentioned that on the last day from Woodhouse Lane, Look North brought in an extra camera and Clare Frisby revealed that for the last however many years there was more to the presenting the Breakfast opts than the average viewer might have been aware of.

If anyone has that clip, please upload it somewhere, I didn't manage to see it.

Leeds managed to complicate things even further than taking stills and video inserts, they started taking live weather which came an otherwise deserted main studio, complete with CSO'd maps, presumably via the pre-set and unmanned main gallery.

You could tell the presenters who were comfortable with the self-op kit - Peter Levy and Tom Ingall in particular would lead the vision on the throw to weather and it looked so much better than a cut (with accompanying thump) at the end of the introduction.

I don't have the clip but indeed remember that Clare did show us all the kit required for the self-op. It wasn't on screen for long but what I can remember were two monitors, an autocue, a camera above the autocue and then all the mixing equipment on the desk.

Related, TV-Ark had a clip of the final Sunday bulletin when Look North left Woodhouse Lane, which was using the self-op kit, that contained Ian White saying farewell and switching the lights off to 'do some packing'.