Government to suspend Parliament

Well, they clearly can't afford to provide a 24/7 domestic news service, but bear in mind BBC World is a commercial enterprise paid for by subscriptions (one way or another)

To be honest, when I'm abroad and something big is happening here, I watch Sky News, which is available widely abroad as well.

The BBC need to come clean and state they are struggling to run a domestic news channel, transparency will earn them more kudos than the poorly resourced output they are limping along with.

However all that said, what was lacking from BBC Parliament's coverage?

Yes, I think that's the problem. They might as well just axe the BBC News Channel the way things are going. Aside from 6 hours a day, it's not really fit for purpose anymore. It's a shadow of its former self, being incomparable to the BBC News 24 days.

The BBC Parliament coverage was all well and good, but let's be honest, most people aren't going to watch it. I love news and current affairs but I always skip over BBC Parliament. Most of the time it's just boring select committee coverage. Important domestic events should always be covered by BBC News as the chances are more people will see it there. BBC Parliament is niche at best.

There could axe the news channel, and the only content we would lose is afternoon live. BBC 2 has the morning news outlet until noon, Heck BBC News at 5 could work on BBC2 outside wimbledon time.

7pm 100 days is on BBC 4, outside source and newsday would be streamed online.

On the other hand, is going through the motions of the prorogation set piece really news?

After Bercow's speech everything else went per the script as I understand it, so I'm sure that had something out of the ordinary taken place Newsday would have covered it.

This goes way beyond what happened last night, umpteen times its been poor offerings overnight.

There's nothing wrong with Newsday as such but it's very focused on Asia. A shorter UK bulletin at 12 followed by a repeat of NewsNight would work a lot better. When obvious scheduled events like this come up (and there's probably only 10 or 11 a year) it shouldn't be impossible to cover them for a domestic audience.




Not very much, it was very good. However, Sky had a few cameras between the lords and the commons which didn't appear on the BBC Parliament's coverage (as far as I'm aware, I was going back and forth between the two)

Like others, the go to station for any UK event after midnight is now sky news. Looking back at clips on Youtube, there was better breaking UK news coverage on the BBC late at night in the 80's (Newsflashes and such like)

Before anyone else says it, I know it's a bit of an over exaggeration, but not by that much.

The Tories refused to go back into the Commons after the ceremony.

I’m sure someone’s probably already said it. But I don’t know why they didn’t just do the common sense thing and put BBC Parliament’s output on BBC News until conclusion.

However this was no ordinary prorogation as John Bercow himself said. It was a significant moment given the ongoing Brexit crisis.

I think we're lucky to have any live news between 12 and 6am as a fair bulk of other countries have a looped newswheel domestically overnight. I think the reason Sky were better yesternight was due to Kimberley Leonard handling timings well, Jon Craig's commentary and actually sticking with the rolling images. On the other hand, the BBC have previously trounced Sky, the overnight presenters often being more experienced/versatile than Sky's, so it can be hit and miss. Not to forget overnight (our time) France 24/Bloomberg/CNN are good on breaking news depending on the story.

Indeed the issue is that at certain times of the time, the News Channel just simply does not cover domestic news - you'll get stories that would be significant enough to be rolling news during daytime hours but because the channel is airing World News the most it gets is a passing mention.

A particular example I remember was David Davis resigning as Brexit secretary (back when the Brexit Secretary line-up had less members than the Sugababes) late on Sunday night. Sky went into rolling news mode and covered it in detail whereas BBC just went straight to Newsday which was focussing on the Thai cave rescue which of course was the right story for a World News channel but meant a story which had it happened at midday would've had rolling coverage on the news channel barely got any mention.
Similarly, with the Leicester helicopter crash because it happened around the time of the World News simulcast it was barely covered for the first few hours with the channel going to taped programs like Our World instead.

You can't necessarily expect BBC to have staff on hand to do domestic bulletins just around the clock in case a major domestic breaks but at the same time these days it does seem if it's not 'news channel time' (so it's say the 100 Days/Newsday/World News Today simulcasts) then they simply won't roll with a major domestic news story no matter how important it is.