Five News

Not fond of that pictures-from-sky-sports-cloud.

http://www.fatsky.co.uk/blah/five.jpg

Hmm... there's glass in front of that plasma screen.

http://www.fatsky.co.uk/blah/five.jpg

Hmm... there's glass in front of that plasma screen.



Me too, it looks like a bad mock where someone's just discovered the 'clone brush' tool in Paint Shop Pro.

I dunno, just struck me as looking a bit ugly in my opinion, and stood out in comparison with the rest of what we've seen so far (which isn't much, of course) which looks really good.

Doesn't matter really, though, no.

Comment: What can we learn from American news shows?
As she gets ready for a new-look bulletin on Five, Kirsty Young says that we could benefit from their clarity and panache. By Bryan Appleyard

Eight years ago this March, Kirsty Young perched. Soon afterwards, in his first interview of the 1997 election campaign, Tony Blair perched next to her. A new world had been born.

Okay, it was only a small new world, but it was an important one. British television news is a national institution with a highly specific iconography. There was Richard Baker picking up a sheet of A4 and announcing the death of Kennedy. There was the epic grandeur of Reggie Bosanquet, a little the worse for wear. There was Nick Witchell sitting on an invading lesbian. There were Anna Ford’s wonderful lips, and there are still Jon Snow’s terrible ties. Then, suddenly, on Five’s first news bulletin, there was Young perched on a desk.

Not only did she perch, she walked and talked. It was unprecedented. Prior to that moment, British anchors had only to buy the top third of a suit, as two-thirds of their bodies were always concealed behind desks. Admittedly, since January 17, 1983, Frank Bough and Selina Scott had been revealed full-length on the BBC Breakfast Time sofa. But that was a show that just happened to include news. Until Young’s momentous perch, the news bulletin had been sacred, delivered to the masses from behind the altar of the desk. Even the once revolutionary CNN, broadcasting since 1980, had not dared to go so far.

Now, of course, everybody perches, walks and talks. In fact, it’s got out of hand. Presenters on both Sky News and ITV appear in what the latter calls a “theatre of news”. These are vast arenas filled with screens, stages and hacks hunched over yet more screens. The news has become a sci-fi epic, with the presenters acting as heroically wired cyborgs, leading us to safety and wisdom through the laser fire.

So it is time for Kirsty Young and Five to go back to basics. The contract for their news service has shifted from ITN to Sky and, out in the weird, weird west London wasteland of Sky’s Osterley site, they are plotting the relaunch, tomorrow, of Young’s perch. They are doing this in the midst of the huge new studios being built for Sky News itself. “We wanted something that gave us a big wow factor, with wide shots,” says Five’s news editor, Mark Calvert, “but that also allowed us the intimacy of big close-ups with Kirsty.”

Calvert is perched on a bench with Young. Never having been much of a percher, I’m leaning. We are inside what looks like, in the words of Chris Shaw, Five’s senior programme controller, “Kirsty’s duplex apartment”. Designed by PDG — Production Design Group, the hottest name in American studio styling — it is a roughly oval space with a staircase rising to a platform that, if this really were an apartment, would lead to a bedroom. Flat screens display abstract patterns, but these vanish when the transparent screens of “clever” glass (it frosts over when an image is projected) immediately behind the bench are activated. The style is approximately colour-field post-high-tech — homely but smart, more a pad than a theatre of news.

“We’ve reacted against what’s happened in those big studios,” says Shaw. “We’ve always tended to place journalism above production. That’s what’s happened in the past five years — news has become enamoured of production techniques at the expense of the content of the journalism. We’ve put the emphasis on people and the way they deliver their stories.”

This is not as straightforward as it sounds. Television news on both sides of the Atlantic is in turmoil. After the catastrophe of the Hutton inquiry, the BBC has taken refuge in its specialists, pumping out flamboyantly informed analysis as opposed to dangerously hot news. Meanwhile, both Sky and ITV have leapt into the galaxy with Jean-Luc Picard, relying on visuals for impact.

Yet these things do not happen in a British vacuum. All our shows are heavily influenced by US television news. Where they lead, we follow, for the very good reason that they do it better than we do. And, over there, news is in even more violent turmoil. Two of the superanchors, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, are retiring, leaving only Peter Jennings. These avuncular, weathered types are the traditional godfathers of American TV news: soft liberals with con-soling haircuts. But Brokaw is being replaced with Brian Williams, an anchor said to appeal to “Nascar Man”, the Middle American who votes Republican and watches Nascar motor-racing. Liberal East and West Coasters used to dismiss such people as inhabitants of “fly-over America”. And news itself is under pressure. A CBS producer has been sacked for breaking into the climax of an episode of CSI:NY to announce the death of Yasser Arafat. It’s a clear case, Shaw believes, of the commercial forces that are threatening the authority of television news in America. Meanwhile, Fox News, still the new kid on the block, pursues a ruthlessly neocon agenda.

Five News, therefore, is re- thinking itself at a tricky moment. And, to everybody’s credit, it is doing so with a clear sense of the American news ascendancy.

“The Americans brought clarity to television news,” says Shaw. Young, meanwhile, regards the great female figures in America — Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and, above all, Katie Couric — as her heroines, women who do hard and soft stories with equal conviction.

“Watching those kinds of American women has been a big influence,” she says, “because there’s not really been that kind of woman on British television, somebody on the front line, not an adjunct, not lower down the pecking order. Five did that with me seven years ago, and they were the first to do it — which seems ridiculous, since the Americans had been doing it for years. Our preconception that British television is the best in the world is simply not true. You only have to look at Will and Grace, or NBC’s Today programme, to know it’s not true. I think their news is really good, and we’re not allowed to say that here.”

Young briefly defected to ITV. There, for 5 hours, she anchored the 9/11 coverage. But she still found she was well down the pyramid whose snow-capped peak was Trevor McDonald. Returning to Five, she was back on top, the face not just of news but of the channel itself. This is, of course, a precarious position, because she is required to remain beautiful.

“Well, like most women, I don’t think I am beautiful, but I look acceptable. But, well, yeah... I accept it, but I don’t think it’s right. Ant and Dec are the biggest stars on ITV, but they’re not gorgeous-looking guys. You wouldn’t get the female equivalent on ITV; she’d have to look right. Anna Ford is a strikingly beautiful woman, and she’s still there looking wonderful. If she looked like a bag of spanners, she wouldn’t be on, that’s the truth of it. I think it’s ridiculous, but I’m not going to give up a job I love because of the injustice of it. Maybe if I was an idealistic 17-year-old, I’d stomp out of the newsroom saying I couldn’t work in this horrendously prejudiced environment. But not now.”

The central problem for television news, as the CBS Arafat story demonstrates, is that it’s a virtuous rather than a profitable enterprise; and so, in any primetime war, news will be the loser. Ratings are overwhelmingly determined by what comes before and after the bulletin, and the under-35s are more or less a lost cause. Shaw says that half the audience of even Newsround, the BBC’s news show for children, is over 50. This was why Young’s perch sparked such a revolution: it seemed to offer a way out of the cul de sac of rigid formats and declining ratings.

“People who work in news are understandably conservative,” says Young. “They don’t want to play fast and loose with the format because you have to have something robust enough to deal with Beslan or 9/11. People tend to fall back on a po-faced approach, and we didn’t have that. We really wanted to talk to people as equals — it’s not something television news was overly familiar with. And we did stay credible.”

The Five news revolution spread rapidly to other channels because everybody thought this was the answer. It wasn’t — the under-35s still don’t watch — but at least it was something. The trick now is to renew the immediacy of that original approach and offer something more intimate than the whizz-bang graphics available elsewhere.

“We can develop the original idea of Five News and take it a bit further,” Young says. “The American model is based on the belief that the person telling you the news is not incidental to it, because, in the end, people do not form a relationship with a wonderful graphic, they do not form a trustworthy bond with a huge blank studio that looks like the inside of an operating theatre, they form a bond with the people who are speaking to them.”

“A bond with the blonde?”

“I didn’t say that. But if I have a strength, it’s that people trust me.”

She’s right. There is some combination of the low, intimate voice, the Scottish accent, the girl-next-door beauty and her unique position as the female face of a whole channel’s news operation that makes Young trusted. She is also the only clear identifying feature that Five has manage to sustain since its inception. Much is therefore hanging on the relaunch of the news show.

Certainly, the industry will be watching after the revolution launched by that first perch. Everybody knows — though few admit — that British television news is not good enough. Something is missing from our heavyweight evening bulletins, and our breakfast shows are almost too embarrassing to watch next to NBC’s Today show when fronted by Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. What is wrong is that the Americans, even though they may be deluded, have an idea of America, whereas we have no idea of Britain. They, therefore, are talking to people; our anchors are talking to a demographic.

Young’s first perch implied a new intimacy, a possibility of contact with people. It might not have worked exactly, but it broke the mould. Five News is pleased with itself, as a result, and confident about its new format. Shaw is going for strong editorial lines from reporters, backed by the vastly increased resources offered by Sky. Young, meanwhile, is hot property, a player, and she knows it. Her new perch will have, if nothing else, attitude.

“I’ve grown up a bit. I’m 36 now. Before, I might have felt less confident about speaking up when I felt strongly about something. But now — oh, f*** it, I’m going to tell them what I think anyway.”

Everybody knows — though few admit — that British television news is not good enough. Something is missing from our heavyweight evening bulletins, and our breakfast shows are almost too embarrassing to watch next to NBC’s Today show when fronted by Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. What is wrong is that the Americans, even though they may be deluded, have an idea of America, whereas we have no idea of Britain. They, therefore, are talking to people; our anchors are talking to a demographic.

http://www.fatsky.co.uk/blah/five.jpg