Look East (West) to get dedicated programme

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/bbc-offers-second-edition-of-look-east-evening-news-bulletin-for-viewers-in-west-of-region/

Look East (West) will now be an entirely separate programme Monday to Friday at 1830. Janine Machin will present Monday to Friday with Amanda Goodman on Fridays. The 2230 separate programmes will continue to remain separate as well. I’m assuming some content will continue to be shared. Will be interesting to see if we continue to see weather OB’s from both the East and West side of the region. I presume weather will continue to be at the end of the programme and therefore pre-recorded for West but presumably it could be earlier in the programme and live from Norwich’s CSO studio.

So Look East (West) will be single headed but Look East (East) will remain with two presenters - though in recent years it hasn’t been uncommon for it to be single headed if Susie or Stewart were off (though only for the odd day - not entire weeks). Perhaps the East edition will end up single headed in the future as well - especially as I think Susie and Stewart generally only present lunchtime and almost never present the late edition.

It's only taken 21 years

It's a long-awaited announcement and a great development. Only downside is that viewers in the West will miss out on Stewart and Susie (who are a fantastic presenting team - able to do credible hard news and much lighter stories without missing a beat).

That's in no way a criticism of Janine and Amanda who are both excellent - more a comment on how good the Norwich team are.



I expect things will be re-evaluated when Stewart eventually retires. He and Susie are such a strong double act (just as he and Penny were before Susie) it would be a real shame to break that up.

They could do what Look North does. Hull has it's weather forecast half way through the programme, communicating live by video link, as the weather presenters are shared with the Leeds programme. I assume Leeds has their forecast at the end of the programme.

Oooh, I've noticed a definite uptake in fully split 6:30 programmes for a while now, but they've trialled it so many times already I didn't want to make yet another prediction that they were going to move to fully split shows! Good news as the team in Cambridge are very strong, although as others have said it does mean West viewers will miss out on Stuart and Susie in Norwich. Is Press Gazette's line that 'Janine Machin will present Monday to Friday with Amanda Goodman on Fridays' the reality or a typo - aka will it be double headed on Fridays or did they mean Mon-Thurs for one presenter and Fridays for the other?

Cambridge viewers will also get the benefit of better facilities for the full 6:30 programme now - whenever they opt back to Norwich you go from having all the straps animate and a camera op in the studio in Cambridge to the fixed shots and fuzzy picture in Norwich!

New sets please!

The oversimplified description of the West Sub-Region in that article ("Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire" ) has ruptured my Pedant Gland.

I wonder what Look East viewers from e.g. Stevenage, Bishop's Stortford, or Milk & Beans would make of that description?!

I can totally understand the article not getting bogged-down in details such as the West sub-region technically reaching into a bit of Norfolk (circa King's Lynn) - nor, conversely, the East sub-region technically having some overlap into e.g. east Cambridgeshire - and that some degree of oversimplification makes for better reading, but I don't feel that not mentioning Herts and MK is quite as understandable.

Have they updated the article since as it now says

Ah, I clearly never read that far into the article the first time. The poor description that I quoted is near the beginning of the piece, and the better description that you've quoted is further down the page.

South Today Oxford next?

I asked the question to a BBC South journalist recently and he said the area just couldn't justify a full programme.

Pfft... fat chance that'd be viable.

It already often struggles to fill 10-15 minutes, with region-stretching stories borrowed mainly from Look East and Points West (and even duplicating certain Berkshire stories that are also running on the Southampton edition of ST). Occasionally BBC London News stories from the likes of Tring (in Hertfordshire) have also appeared.

I'm sure I even remember there once being a rural report featuring Midlands Today's Cath Mackie! Possibly from somewhere like Shipston-upon-Stour in Warwickshire.

There was once the faux pas of a Berkshire story featured in the Oxford opt then showing up in the pan-regional latter half from Southampton, meaning that viewers in the Oxford sub-region saw the exact same story and report package twice within a single half-hour programme! I bet they've been much more careful about comparing running orders, ever since...

In the era when ST Oxford had a fully-separate 6:30pm edition every Friday, it was an absolute car crash of Padding Central. A good chunk of the latter half would generally be a studio interview pre-recorded earlier in the day, featuring whichever minor celeb was appearing in something at a theatre in Oxford that week. The interview would be just a career overview chat and/or blatant plug for the theatre show, as if it was The Graham Norton Show. The guest generally having no other meaningful connection to the region/sub-region (cue some desperate/tenuous "you once played a gig in Aylesbury in 1976" style reference).

They seemingly must've also spent the rest of the week stockpiling non time-specific "slow news day" type items about e.g. local histories/curiosities etc to also help fill-out the full Friday editions. I was always amazed that the full split on Fridays lasted as long as it did.

Can't really see that working 5 nights per week, frankly.

I'll always wonder what the proposed MK-based "Oxbridge" region would've been like...

What is the area covered by the Oxford opt? Is it significantly smaller than Look East (West)?