To add, the most annoying element to the BBCs coverage is Katty Kay's seeming bewilderment at what she's anchoring.
I'm delighted that I'm not the only person who's noticed this - the look of constant surprise in her eyes, and the way she seems to rather suddenly grab the desk from time to time like it's the only thing keeping her upright, as though she's just received some truly earth-shattering life-changing news... it's all very tiresome and distracting.
Mind you, it was much worse earlier on in the coverage - I think she's had some valium since the first two hours of the broadcast. Don't get me wrong though - she's still pretty grating.
Once again, I think the BBC's graphics are just showing themselves to be too stodgy! One line of text, with a BUG that shows the current state of the House and Senate without showing what they mean (by indicating majority target numbers)? Although an improvement on Sky News SD, the graphics simply looked overwhelmed with the amount information.
Indeed - this could be quite easily improved by, for example, displaying something like "SEN - TARGET 50", before the "TARGET 50" then flips over into the individual party counts. A similar arrangement could be made for the House count, and might even have allowed for spelling out the full "HOUSE" rather than just "HSE".
Some very unusual spacing choices have been made with the graphics they've used - there's a stupid amount of spacing around the numbers on the House count when you consider the ridiculously small box used to squeeze "HSE" into. The fact that the text doesn't align with the text in the supers below doesn't help, nor does the different size of the upper-right box (the red/Republican count) compared with the clock on the News Channel.
In fact, just a few very small changes could have been made to the graphics they're using to have made them infinitely better than they currently are, without any costly overhauls of the whole graphics system. It just seems like a rather poor rush-job, where taking a little more time and applying a little more attention to detail would have made a big difference.
