ITV London Tonight

Sorry ALTOWERS but the London FRANCHISE area is a far bigger place than just the Capital. This whole London Thing is why anyone is the suberbs of London is totally forgotten. How about a Home Counties TV.

Yes a great shame Chris Peacock has gone likewise the fabulous Anna Maria Ashe. Why didn't ITN use her. Its typical ITN. Rather like them getting rid of Julia Summerville and Carol Barnes. I'd much rather see them bringing me the news than the likes of Mary and Felicity. Mary always sounds so nervous and Felicity needs to get her contact lenses sorted. She should go into the Guiness Book of records for her blinking.
No .-a bit of maturity is what is needed on ITV news.sadly John Suchets departure will leave even more of a void at the end of march.

Lets hope the BBC snaps up Anna Maria Ashe. A great Loss to ITV LONDON.

And whats with this" LONDON Life" title given to Keir Simmons on London Tonight. Yes ok have strands on the programme, but whats seriously lacking is a news section. Lets have a news desk feature please Mr editior, or is this going to be another RISE???

Would like to agree with previous posters regarding the confusions surrounding the concept of a "London Region"

ITN's offering does seem more Central London focused than LNN's, and the comments from those in the Home Counties ring true - that is the audience would rather see London (in their definition this means effectively Zone 1) stories, being those that effect things that go on "in town". As well as tending to ignore Surrey, Southern Herts and Bucks, South Essex and West Kent, zones 2-6 tend to get left out as well.

The challenge is that this area has the resources to easily support fragmentation of regional TV news effort. You could for instance sustain a Hertfordsitere and Essex version, perhaps taking some territory away from Anglia; move the boundary of the Kent/SE service up towards the M25. You could even have a Surrey version, perhaps also covering Slough and South Bucks. These are only rash debating points, and I know that the current arrangements of transmitters would not allow for such sophistication, even with substantial modifications.

In the digital domain however some of this is possible, by D-SAT a broadcaster could define a service down to an individual household, or even single viewing card,. Cable is less flexible due to the logistics of its distribution, but DTT is where the real challenge lies.

In the rough example that I'd proposed above you could adopt a methodology for regional television that pre-supposes a rationalisation of the multiplex build, possibly along-side analogue black-out. Say ITV had one mux to itself; say that two versions of ITV-1 were broadcast within the mux from each tx. Bluebell Hill would carry both Kent and Essex/Herts versions, with antenna mods this could put a usable service into Southend, Thurrock and further north. CP would have two versions of Mux2, broadcast on separate channels fed into different parts of the stack. One mux could broadcast to the north and east, carrying both London and Essex/Herts variants. The other mux broadcast to the south and west would carry both London and Surrey/Bucks versions

One thing that such a scheme would allow would be to produce soft sub-regional boundaries, giving viewers in the region considerable choice as the flavour of local news that were available. Daft proposal isn’t it? - Well I'm not so sure, there's nearly a quarter of the UK's population in the Crystal Palace tx area.

The end music to London Tonight is brilliant, and does anyother regions use that end music or just London?

It's a shame that the closing music on the short bulletins plays whilst the ITN endcap is on screen

And they've also changed the start of the short titles to have less of an impact, basically.

Joyce Ohajah tonight talked about the work of that great engineer "Isambard Kingdom Brunei" on the late bulletin

Instead of doing that they should get Nicholas Owen to do the 10.56am bulletin. All they would need to do is quickly change the CSO background during the few seconds between bulletins and there you go.

Or, better idea, they should get Paul Greene to do it, along with the lunchtime and early morning bulletins.

Katie Derham has a column in today's Telegraph

The idea that viewers in Surrey should tune into Meridian News on Sky and get Surrey stories is nonsense. Meridian News from Southampton doesn't even seem to cover its official area. Most of the stories cover the coastal areas in Dorset, Hampshire and West Sussex. If you live in areas like Petersfield, Andover and Basingstoke, which are in their official transmission area, you are mainly ignored by Meridian.

Jonathan Wills is doing today's bulletins and isn't it meant to be Phil G doing the bulletins tomorrow.

She is also presenting on Classic FM just now, until 4 this afternoon.