Northern England and Southern Scotland Thread

Not strictly true a young female newsreader said goodbye the other week.She said that she was sorry to be going that was on a late bulletin.

Then the other day Heather Larcombe said just time to say goodbye to ..........our engineer who has worked here for 20yrs.

I felt that on tonights show they could have said something to mark the end of Lookaround from Carlisle .I must admit i thought that Fiona did look well p****d off during the programme.I think she just probably wanted to say F*** ITV and what a way to treat us at Border after all these years .All a facade. I must admit i felt sorry for them especially Fiona she is great.

Does anyone know if that cute guy with the tan and cropped hair is leaving i think his name is Lee.

I suppose the staff at Westcountry didn't care as they were all leaving anyway .

The blonde sports guy on Tyne Tees, Ian Haslam I think, made a thinly veiled goodbye at the end of his sports desk..

There may be something on the BBC late bulletin about the Border TV studios closing.

A shame Mark Warr has left, though at least he got to say goodbye, he thanked viewers for their company because of the time in the morning. A greater shame he's getting replaced by Helen Pearson, from what I've seen of her reporting tonight she had strange facial expressions, as if she was half asleep and drunk.

Hopefully Simon O'Rourke will be the sports presenter on the new show, as he's the only one left out of four now!

What about Kenny Toal is there another Tyne Tees news region that he presents or has he left too.

Did they mention anything on the main edition of Look North? Fiona is indeed great and im going to miss her as I dont think she will pop up that much.

Funky Guy, I think you mean Lee Madan - presenting bulletins lately? Hes kept his job as have a lot of the young journalists. Each one is going to have an area of the border region to cover. There is about 7 or so. But they arent what I would call familiar to us and wont be around long as most young ones leave Border after a few years (mainly to Granada!).

Looks like Jonathan (left?) and Adam are leaving as they probably got a bit of redundancy and thought it was better to leave on a high?

Does anyone think that 'our familiar lookaround faces' will get to present the lookaround again?

Because this is specific to the region, just like the West/Westcountry one is.

Not being from the area, but with talk of NET South did North East Tonight have North/South opts then (effectively one Tees, one Tyne I guess!). I'm guessing these are going with the merger.

It's fairly odd it's happening midweek - any particular reason? Long term too I can't see keeping the two programme names going working - how will they sign off in the second half for example?

I'd guess they'd just say the programme. Although I can't say for Tyne Tees, but for Border the reporters always sign off with ITV Border News at the end of their reports, so it'll be interesting to see how that'll work on the new programme.

Good to see their sticking with their old names, but what's happening with regards to the pan-Regionals? ie GMTV, lunchtimes and weekends.

I'm not sure what you mean by that sentence. Westcountry staff did care about the studios closing and ITV news moving right away from the region.

If they had been allowed to express an opinion about on air about the cuts I think they would have.

Re the end of Lookaround from Border . Adam Powells sign off ' This Was Adam Powell for Lookaround ' was the most noticeable goodbye.

This report was shown on Friday's Look North:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7902868.stm

Yes, these ended last Monday and all bulletins since then have been pan-regional. The Tyne Tees sub-regions were infamously on/off affairs although I'm certain this is the final curtain.


I believe it's to make the changes less noticeable. As stated in other threads, the merger process has been ongoing for about a week now, getting Newcastle viewers used to stories from Middlesbrough and vice versa and Border viewers used to stories from the North East.


It does seem odd although again I think it's all in the name of hiding the changes from Joe Public. My suggestion would be to brand the final 15 minutes of pan-regional features as Lookaround.

Half the regions that are changing have changed midweek, Anglia did and so did Calendar