BBC News (UK) presentation - Reith launch onwards

I saw this live this afternoon and thought they were a marked improvement especially as the ticker had been reinstated and the wording easier to read against the grey background. Then...Reith returned.

No, it's not.

The ticker was actually grey (except for breaking news when it turned red) back in the 2008 N6 days

This time I suppose it was to do with configuration changes as opposed to being intentionally selected, however. Or, another guess is that what we saw today is a backup package should the Reith graphics fail, but one wonders why they would still use the Gill Sans logo, if this were the case (unless it's because it requires less resources somehow).

Obit rehearsal and someone forgot to load them back after testing? There were no animations, everything black / grey so weren't the usual old style.

Although, the logo and ticker did animate in and out as they used to, but the logo was a few seconds behind the ticker in terms of animating off screen.

Nonsense.

Not nonsense. They look like Category 1 obit graphics. Just a mistake.

Do tell. They re-skinned a package for death coverage? What breaking news red is considered poor taste?

Yes it’s very common to re-colour for a royal death. See coverage of the Queen Mother: red turned to black.

But I’d be surprised if that’s the reason this hitch happened - why would they still be using old graphics / the Gill Sans logo for obits?

Well clearly the wrong package was loaded for that bulletin, but what makes it interesting to me is that it's not a package we've seen before with those colours. I don't doubt that it was purely accidental it was loaded, but I'd love to know why it even existed.

Obviously this discounts the (very real) possiblity that it was just the old graphics, and old metadata has been removed from whatever drives the graphics so it appears with the wrong colours, text missing and so on.

And for those suggesting it might be a backup graphics package, again I ask why would the backup look completely different to the normal look - we're not talking slightly different kerning and no animation (e.g. rendered as stills on a computer), this is a completely different look, running off the same hardware with the same automation as the normal graphics. That's no backup, that's a mistake.

Happy Anniversary, 1, 6 and 10. Relaunched on this day seventeen years ago. And, as pointed out by both TvLive and MediaBoy on Twitter, the programmes launched with a new presenter line-up:

• Anna Ford
• George Alagiah and Sophie Raworth
• Huw Edwards

Feels like only yesterday.......

So you're guessing?



This seems far more likely to me than it being an obituary graphics package.