George Alagiah's time check during the BBC News at 6

Whenever I watch George do his time check on the BBC News at 6, he always seems to be completely unprepared, abruptly homing his gaze onto his clock, and even occasionally appearing a little startled when he (seemingly) is first aware of the time check he is to give as the preceding news report ends.

When the time check is to directly follow a specific report, is this not communicated to him in advance, via the Auto Cue, maybe as that preceding report begins, so he is ready and fully prepared to give it, upon the return to the studio?

I always think that newsreaders hesitate deliberately to make things sound a little less scripted at times. You could say the same thing when Huw Edwards (et al) delivers a direct quote, but reads it from a paper script rather than the autocue.

Not entirely sure this should be posted here, surely for pres thread but I'll answer...

The time hangs beneath the autocue monitors, attached to the camera, so he should be seeing it from multiple sources. Nicholas Owen for example will usually look up for a time check.

From what I’ve seen the Furios don’t have a time display on the rig. I believe he could see the time in the tiny confidence monitor that hangs below showing the program feed but that would be too small. I suppose they could burn a larger timecode into the video feed on the monitor.

There’s probably other instructions much more important before/after the packages before the time check. If a producer gives him an estimate it may be wrong and viewers would be outraged/complain. Apparently Good Morning Britain gets a lot of messages for the wrong time when people the +1 feed.

On a different board’s chat I asked if it was possible for the Autoscript software (I believe that’s the software the BBC uses for prompting although the equipments Autocue - both are from same company but different brands) to have auto update fields. Apparently there is a way that the accurate time can be inserted into the script but isn’t implemented.

On this 360 degree panorama of Studio E you can see that there is a large screen opposite the presenter (partially obscured by a camera in this image) which includes a clock, the same kind of display that is in use all over the BBC these days.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/belowred/8507745320

Yes this is IPE's IDS system, small linux PCs connected to cheap monitors to replace hardware clocks and tally lights. http://www.ipe-technologies.com/ids-tech . Prevalent but not necessarily better than the hardware it replaced. Roll your own with a bunch of raspberry pi's and save yourself thousands!

To answer Rkolsen's question yes it could be feasible, certainly the ones I've had experience of did update but never reliably, with the operator sometimes having to scroll out of the story boundaries and back in to force a refresh of the copy.

That Autocue/ ENPS integration in BBC News certainly used to be quite the opposite - and a total nightmare... If you updated the ENPS version of the on-air story it updated on Autocue instantly. If the Autocue operator had done their job and tidied the script to make it more legible, all of that tidying disappeared, and the position of the script was often changed by a number of lines as a result, right as the presenter was reading it...

I can understand why other systems would inhibit changes to the on-air story for precisely this reason (it could well have been an Autocue config option that was not enabled...)