ITV faces fine after Central News East 'emergency'

Media Guardian reports:

The media regulator Ofcom could fine ITV for broadcasting a pre-recorded regional news bulletin.

The ITV Central late evening bulletin for the east Midlands, which is presented by Lucy Kite, had to be pre-recorded an hour before transmission because of an "emergency situation involving the director", a spokeswoman for the broadcaster said.

No replacement could be found for the director at short notice, so the decision was taken to pre-record the five-minute bulletin, which is broadcast towards the end of ITV's half-hour 10.30pm network news programme.

Full story: http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1450612,00.html

I laugh at this! They deserve it!!

What - he got drunk?

John

What on earth makes you think that?

So they couldn't cope with one five minute spot without a director?
I know he's like the most important guy there, and I'm maybe being totally crazy, but surely... are you telling me that if the director collapsed in the middle of live news it would instantly fall off air? Surely if everyone knows what is supposed to happen, then excepting any disasters/breaking news type stuff, no-one viewing would have a clue?We are talking about a very short local bullitin, not half an hour at six o'clock...

According to Media Guardian this was down to a broadcast ASSISTANT being asked to take over as director.

This person asked for acting up pay, and obviously was told no.

Whoever this was, if this is what happened, WELL DONE - if you do a job, you should be payed the correct money for that job.

on a lot of these short bulletins (early morning and late news) the director is also vision mixer and they run by a skeleton crew.. they're lucky there was someone there who could've taken over (even if they didn't want to!)

Emergency involving the director?

John

Err - do you have a clue what you are talking about?

1. In many cases the director is also the vision mixer, the play-in operator, the PA, the graphics operator etc. - in fact in some regions the director is the only person left other than the presenter, and possibly an engineer. (Some BBC regions operate with a director, a presenter and that's about it. The presenter writes and produces the bulletin, edits - or cuts down - the " VT"s, and operates their own autocue. The director is responsible for vision mixing, sound mixing, lighting/cameras as well as timing, graphics - and oh - directing...)

2. Even if you have a full crew and everyone DOES know what they are supposed to do - it doesn't mean the director is redundant. Even if vision mixers, sound people, camera operators etc. DO know what they are doing, you still need someone to co-ordinate things.

Sure - there are some vision mixers (if indeed Central still have separate vision mixers) and some of them may be able to direct, similarly some production assistants (if Central still have them) may also be able to accept the challenge - but there is no guarantee that fully competent people in either of these roles would be happy accepting the responsibility of directing (even if they have the experience to do so)

Difficult as it may be to accept - some people are close to being indispensible - and as fewer people are required to make TV shows, the more important full crewing is. This is one of the reasons ITV regional news is co-siting - it is easier to cover sickness if you have a larger pool of people working in the same place, rather than having to have standby people in 3 different regional centres. (The combined pool of people required to cover a co-sited operation is smaller than that required to cover three separaete island sites) Of course - in this case it WAS a co-sited operation that failed - so it sounds like they are cutting things back even further...

Very good point made there noggin, couldn't agree with you more.

What I don't get is why they didn't move Central South to Brum as Nottingham is a much bigger city and covers a larger area to Abingdon, which has always seemed somewhat of an anomoly to me...

I recall someone from Ulster Television (who would have known about these things) telling me that their 7.59 and 8.59 updates in the early 1990s were recorded on occasion.

Is at least one of the BBC NI Newsline update bulletins not recorded or at least replayed from earlier?

What about the BBC News on BBC One Scotland last week after the Italy v Scotland football match, it was on at a different time to the bulletin on the network. Were they both live?

I could only presume that Central at Nottingham was quite expensive to keep open if only Regional News is being made and no National Productions are being made, so it probably makes sense to move CNE into CNW where there was a spare studio available.

Where as Central South I presume only has one studio and one Newsroom to operate which would probably be more cheaper to run.