Itv Generic Regional News Programmes

Very true, I think you have hit the nail on the head!

Tell that to the BBC, they started it!

Bit of a cheap swipe there, isn't it?! Even the anorakiest of anoraks would find it hard pushed to differentiate between the Anglias and the Tyne Tees, the Centrals and the Meridians.

They do differ a fair bit actually - especially the three Meridian sets and Central East, which have fixed backdrops instead of the projection screens they have in all other regions.

UTV's set looks nothing like the generic ITV one and I doubt that it will ever become like it since they also film the lifestyle segment of UTV Live from the same set.

http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/utv_live_53.jpg

And that exposes the utter folly of the suits running ITV at present.

What on earth was the point in closing City Road and building these new offices in Gateshead, when we all know that the whole lot is going to be closed in a matter of a few years anyway?

Why not just let City Road run to the end?

The new studio is awful, a tiny effort utterly lacking in any imagination. And it wilfully relegates the local news to the sofa format. Absolutely pathetic -- it looks like something bought out of an Ikea catalogue -- and that is the spirit of the thing.

Why can't ITV just stop local altogether, get rid of their PSB requirements and sod off out of the terrestrial bandwidth once and for all -- they have no place there, being as they are an overblown satellite channel whose time has well and truly passed.

Tyne Tees hasn't had a decent set since early 2000. This set is a major improvement on the last four.

> Tyne Tees hasn't had a decent set since early 2000.

If that's the case, they still don't. At least the previous four were news sets, not something that looks like a pastel-shaded cast-off from This Morning.

The idea is not so that all regions look the same, but so that regional and national news have a similar design theme, creating a corporate look.

We don't exactly know that. It's only people predicting and nobody can argue against it as nobody has a crystal ball!

Personally as they are investing in all this new kit, I can't see them giving up regional news ever

Although I initially opposed it, I now agree with the principle of having one generic set, score and titles for all regions in principle .
The greatest benefit of a corporate look is that it greatly reduces costs. In the past, 20 set designers, 20 graphic artists, and 20 composers had to be payed to produce unique titles for each programme. The current situation is that only one set designer, one graphic artist and one composer is needed to design one generic set.
A generic style across all programmes also improves the production quality of most programmes. Having said that, I strongly dislike the generic style currently used by the ITV regional news programmes. The titles are unimaginative, the music is dull, and the set seems too cramped. Why not go for something like this?
A second example.

Those old Central News titles are fantastic - without a doubt my favourite regional news titles ever!

As for the generic titles saving money, I'd buy that argument if I thought for a minute the savings were going back into regional news. The recent redundancies show this is evidently not the case.