NUJ BBC Strikes

On Newcastle's astons: most regions add them live via BigTed3. The journos type the aston they want into the production system ENPS, ENPS sends that to BigTed which 'types' up the aston in a predefined style. (There's a lot more to BigTed but that's the essense of it). Quite why if NUJ members were on strike that meant astons had to be burned in is a little mysterious, as the technical staff in the gallery shouldn't have been on strike because if they belong to a union it's more likely to be BECTU. Therefore the actual operation of getting the programme to air (keying captions being one of them) should have been unaffected.

That said, a lot of centres do have templates set up on the Quantel editing system that allow astons to be burnt on. Some regions may use this for breakfast packages, some use it purely as a backup. In theory though, they ought to be set up to look like proper News Lower Thirds with Gill Sans as the font!!

Some regions use videojournalists in the gallery don't they? Jersey is all multiskilled afaik.

Isn't it the case that Look North Newcastle is in a particularly pro-union area, what with the history of the miners strikes in the 70s etc. They didn't broadcast at all during the last strike, so I imagine yesterday they were running at a skeleton staff even more skeletal than the other regions, hence the dodgy graphics.

Thought this might be of interest to those who'd like a look at the strikes from a National and Local perspective. On my site, TVPres.UK, I've put online what BBC Breakfast, the News channel, and all of the regions (Excl. Newsline and Look North NE and Lincs) looked like on the day of the NUJ strikes, in a TVPres.UK special! You can take a look here.

/advert

Its quite amazing, that the BBC still haven't got their Regional News sets in line with one another (Like ITV do), theres some still stuck in the wooden floor 1999 era!

You can guarantee though if all regions had been updated that people would complain about the waste of money.

BBC Look East only relatively recently aligned the Cambridge sub region with the Norwich studio and that would look stranger considering both studios appear in the 1830 programme.

They refreshed both studios together, back in 2009! Cambridge TV + radio moved into the same building, and they refreshed the studio to match the National studio at the same time - Norwich did this too.

Wow longer back than I remembered but I believe that possibly since moving to The Forum the Norwich and Cambridge studios differed with Cambridge having a desk and Norwich having that Tefal desk and possibly something else.

There are no studios left in that era anymore - the last proper one was Cambridge which was changed in late 2009. Look North Newcastle had elements of the studio (such as the wooden floor and desk) until their new studio also in late 2009.

Err yes there are studios left in that era still. You can see them on the link Critique provided. 3 regions still have the wooden floor design.

North West Tonight and Midlands Today: can you confirm who the lead female presenters are on strike day, as featured on your site? Very nice images by the way. Many thanks in advance.

That's not the main design though, just the floor! If you look the sets are vastly different from 1999, all of them.

No cream, no red, no little 'windows', I think, certainly in EMT's case the floor was painted on and isn't actually laminate.