Presenters and Rostas

I wonder if the BBC Two bulletin was usually scheduled against Grandstand - which could run for a pretty long time on BBC One? (i.e. the BBC realised it needed to offer a reasonable afternoon bulletin but there wasn't an early slot on BBC One?)

Didn't NewsView also carry subtitles in the days before teletext subtitles on news bulletins were universal (and near universally receivable)?

Towards the end at least, I'm sure the BBC2 Saturday news aired around 7pm, sometimes followed by Correspondent and What the Papers Say (i.e. a mini 'news/current affairs block')

Can someone explain why the BBC always retained a mid-evening bulletin on BBC 2 on Saturday nights until at least 1999, when they axed the bulletin the rest of the week?

It was considered at the time that a gap between 1710 and 2220ish for news was unsuitable. The early evening bulletin always following Grandstand’s conclusion. News24 made this omission palatable so the BBC TWO bulletin could be dropped.

Going back to the original post; could it have been conceivable that Peter Sissons was hosting the programme from a LIVE location and Moira was handling the studio end?

Was the date in question newsworthy for any particular reason?

Was rare though for bulletins to be anchored on location prior to this century.

Quite. Location presentation of the One / Six / Nine was pretty rare pre-2000.

I think ITN used to do it more than the BBC back then. I'm sure Alastair Burnet/Leonard Parkin used to go to the political party conferences and I recall News at Ten being presented on location during the Gulf War '91, the South African elections in '94, the Russian elections in '96, Hong Kong handover and devolution referendums in '97 and the Kosovo War in '99. In fact, I think the BBC One/Six/Nine were also presented on location for the Hong Kong and devolution referendums.

ITN also frequently presented from Washington at the time of US presidential elections, News at Ten was definitely co-presented from Washington in 1988 and 1996, not sure about 1992, though. I seem to recall Trevor McDonald also presented NAT from Washington in 1993 when he had a big set-piece interview with President Clinton.

So it seems ITN were quite comfortable with presenting on location pre-2000 - for some reason the BBC weren't quite so much.

The last ever Nine from the virtual era was presented by Michael Buerk in Edinburgh, with Peter Sissons in London:



I'm sure I've seen a clip somewhere too of Martyn Lewis presenting on location after the death of Princess Diana. As said above, it was a rarity to happen before 2000.

I don't think this is right at all, I'm afraid. The main evening news on a Saturday for most of the nineties was on far nearer nine o'clock than it was ten o'clock. Here's a typical Saturday night in 1995 when the news is on at 8.55, and if you look through Genome for most of the Saturdays that year, and for most of the nineties, that sort of time was certainly more common than after ten - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1995-10-21

Here's Ghostwatch day in 1992, again the news is at five past nine - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1992-10-31

Besides, there were far greater gaps between news bulletins, most obviously after the main bulletin around 9.15 when there was no more news for the rest of the evening. Not that much ever happens on a Saturday evening anyway.



One reason why there perhaps wasn't so much presentation on location on BBC News came from the various divisions in the Beeb between news, current affairs and events, so if the news started encroaching on events' territory they would get a bit fed up.

I remember reading in Private Eye about the Hong Kong Handover, the events department were in charge of the coverage and they were run by Philip S Gilbert, who didn't get on with the news department and didn't much care for many of the news people, so for events like this and things like VE Day he would always choose his own presenters. That meant that the coverage of these things was usually hosted by John Tusa, Gilbert's preferred presenter, and I remember Private Eye saying how odd that was as Tusa had left BBC News quite recently saying how much he hated John Birt, and now he was back on the Beeb. But the events department were really desperate to keep their own automony. That also meant that everything had to be done in duplicate because news had to send over their presenters and reporters for the news programmes.

Anyway, since then it's all one BBC now and there isn't all those levels of management and loathing between the various departments, hence why Huw Edwards does the big events.

It did happen from time to time. The titles weren't really suited to it - they had to cut the pictures before the 'pan' to the desk and presenter.

Yes, in the 70s, News at Ten was often presented from the party conferences (or at least the Labour and Tory ones). In that era the locations were Blackpool and Brighton. I'm pretty sure the end cap for those broadcasts would end on an 'ITN and Granada (or Southern) co-production' ?