General Election Thread

[quote="cylon6" pid="660535"]

The differences I've noticed are better HD picture quality than I've ever seen from TC1 and lack of DD5.1 sound, which we usually get from TC1.

BBC Archives have rather quietly put up a new collection called SWINGOMETER - lots of old footage of elections on TV, plus some behind-the-scenes stills.

Well, the intended Christian Pary PPB was dropped because, at the last minute, some candidates dropped out and they failed to field the number required to qualify for one. I think the Jury Team's might have been dropped for the same reason. But it is true there are fewer parties getting PPBs, not like when we had the Pro-Life Alliance and the Referendum Party and all that. I think there are more independent candidates this time.

The Broadcasters' Liaison Group website (which is terrible) has some information about who's eligible for PEBs - though much of it appears not to have been updated since last year's European elections.

The BBC have all the PEBs online. If anyone's seen one with better production values than the Scottish Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, I'd like to see it.

Is the BBC News Channel simulcasting BBC's electoin programme throughout Friday morning then or will they break away at some point?

Really I think BBC1 could have scheduled through to 6pm regardless - whatever happens they'll be enough to cover on the Friday afternoon, and no desperate need for viewers to see the daytime fare on offer.


BTW, is Eammon presenting on Sky all morning on Friday, ruling him out of This Morning?

The PA have published a list of expected declaration times: http://election.pressassociation.com/Declaration_times/general_by_time.php

Well I think there's a load of pant-wettingly stupid excitement in this thread that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later.

You are under no circumstances going to get a TC1 style setup for the news at Broadcasting House, do you realise how much money TC1 costs to run? Taking into account they have traditionally hid away in N8/ N6 at weekends to avoid powering up TC7 to save money and TC7 is one of the smaller studios.

The reason the set is so grand and dramatic is it's a working micro-newsroom, the sheer scale of information and OBs required on an election night is unlike a normal news bulletin and the set is so big because it's FULL OF PEOPLE. As excellent as it looks they're using it because of practical reasons as well as vanity ones. They can get away with smaller studios for other elections becaue there is much less data to process.

The person a few threads back who was gushing about having a tc1 style studio in BH... are you actually insane? Did you actually pause to think about that before you barfed it out onto your keyboard? That would essentially be the entire basement, remember TC1 is that entire brick cube at the left of TVC, it's massive. Do you honestly think they'd dedicate that much space to Simon McCoy on the news channel? If anything is that size it's the entire newsroom itself, containing up to 4 studios.

The reason Sky News have their fancy set is in part becaue it IS their newsroom, but the BBC is much bigger than Sky and cannot aford to muck about with space in the same manner.

Aside from my wish that this post was more coherant I do wish posters would engage their brains before posting stupid things like "let's use a massive expensive set for the news channel every day, I'd gladly sell my house to pay for the licence fee increase to support it." As bland as N6 is, do we have to go the way of Fox News with people standing on a studid podium with rotating plasmas just because it looks "wow"? Can you imagine how insufferable the old farts on snoddy's show would be then? urgh.

Urgh, yes. This talk about TC1 highlighting how crap the NC set is so completely vacuous.

The point about rolling news is you really don't need the Sky Starship with its more presentation areas than people to pull it off day to day. Notice how after a studio refresh, Sky enjoy fannying about in every corner of the place for about a week before settling down to a desk in front of a wall to deliver the news.

Quite frankly the NC could come from a broom cupboard. The whole point about rolling news is without a tight agenda (like a bulletin) there's no need to be anything other than quite prosaic with read to camera, report, down-the-line, done.

Personally, in the interests of transparency and accountability I actually find it quite compelling that the BBC have come up with a cost-saving solution that lets the NC (and other News programmes) focus on what they do...

On the "will they go on until 6pm" issue, if by some chance its exceptionally close its worth remember only 649 of the 650 constituencies are voting. Thirsk and Malton (North Yorkshire, it's new - sort of - abolished in 1983 and reinstated this year due to boundary changes) aren't polling until three weeks later because a UKIP candidate died during the campaign.

David Dimbleby's 10 monitors are worth a look if you've not already seen them:

http://tweetphoto.com/20821428

To be honest, in this configuration, a lot of them are showing the same stuff. I assume someone is dedicated to looking after them for him and calling up relevant info throughout the programme. I'm not sure how helpful the 16 way split of outside sources is - I think I'd struggle to see it at that distance. Seems he hasn't got a teleprinter this time either (did that go in 2001 or was it still around last time? I'm finding a complete recording of the 2005 broadcast hard to come by.)

I always think the chief political correspondent and Tony King etc. are a bit underserved - Dimbleby has such a vast amount of data being fed to him but they sit there with almost nothing..

He's 71 now. Maybe he'll decide this is the last time he wants to put himself through this insane broadcast...

The 16 OSes will occasionally make an appearance on the vast LCD wall - it's possible they're only there because it's a preview monitor of what'll be on there. Also, there's been a weekend of rehearsals since that photo was taken - I'm sure the screens will have been rearranged many times since...

Of course suggestions that there will be a TC1 style/ sized studio at BH is absolute c*ap. My questions wasn't about "Will we get a huge studio at BH", but rather will there be sufficient studios at BH for broadcasts like Election coverage. For example, what will happen when it comes to the Swingometer and other green-screen elements - you presumably need quite a deal of space for that alone. So will there be enough space and resources at BH for this type of event, or will a TC1-type studio still need to be used, if anything, to house all the workers?

A couple of questions I'm sure some of you know the answers too:

Is every count filmed? I know most venues do counts for multiple constituencies, so it's not like there are 649 venues, but I'd imagine there is well over 100.

And following on from that, is there a pool arrangement in place on election night or does everyone have to do their own thing?