I must admit i just couldn't imagine Scotland Today without Shereen i realy like her.She's presented the programme for about 20 yrs and must be one of the longest serving regional news readers.
I must admit i just couldn't imagine Scotland Today without Shereen i realy like her.She's presented the programme for about 20 yrs and must be one of the longest serving regional news readers.
EDIT - John is a bit of alright
I think Mike Neville and Stewart White have been around for quite a while too.
As for the set - isn't it bizarre? Nasty sofa, and very dated floor. Good to see they've gone for the standard "wood box to cover plasma stand base" bodge as well..
Gavin
Thanks for the uploads. It was great to see a recent shot of Shereen. I was amazed with the long hair - somehow never ever expected from our Shereen!!!
And Lewis, you are correct, I could never ever imagine ST without Shereen. She is without doubt the best asset that STV has in terms of news presentation.
Long may she continue to be a fixture on our screens.
Merry Christmas to you guys over there. Aw the best!! And give my best to Shereen when you next bump into her.
Oh God you shouldn't have asked. Ah well, time for a quick pre-bed rant I suppose.....
Reporting Scotland is a shambles. The presentation is tedious. The presenters co-operation with each other varies from wooden to sheer hatred. The region itself is too large. Every third story starts "The Scottish Executive has announced".
Where to start? Well the problem with the very concept of the programme is that the geographical distance of the programme is too large. Stories about something going on in Huntly are as relevant to me in the central belt as a story from Liverpool. The entire point about local news is that the news should be from your backyard, yet the BBC continues to treat Scotland as a 'region'.
In a desperate bid to tick as many boxes as possible, the programme has been known to do a quick 15 second summary of the latest news from a murder trial, and then give us a five minute special report about a species of bird in Inverness, or car parking in Dumfries, in a desperate bid to keep everyone happy. (The Christmas bulletins had something about Orkney airport and an incredibly tedious story about some power supply being converted from steam to... oh God knows, I fell asleep, in Perth).
The news agenda is all wrong. It is not dumbing down to expect more on a murder trial than the Executive announcing a funding initiatve to support whatever. It's too press-release led. It seems whatever the Scottish Executive is telling us to be interested in, they'll do a story about it without much of a challenge.
It also appears to be 15 minutes of real news, and then 15 minutes of and finallys. And whenever Reporting Scotland and Scotland Today do the same story, Scottish destroy them every time.
Reporting Scotland seems to be produced by someone who has come from one of the crappier regional news programmes down south, who treats Scotland as just another region, and is used to dealing with cat stuck up tree stories. Scotland Today, with a far smaller budget, is a far more raw, far more inventive, and far more newsworthy programme. Reporting Scotland is an abysmal waste of money - no wonder the network won't give us a Scottish Six.
The answer? To get a producer who knows what the hell he's doing, get them to watch STV, and create a Scottish Six to do the important Scottish, national and world stories, and then split into regions from half six. But it'll never happen.
Instead BBC Scotland need to accept that most of the national stories are going to come from the central belt, and try to get regional opts as part of Reporting Scotland (in much the same way as the Channel Islands gets them from Spotlight, or Border Scotland from Lookaround).
Not having seen either for quite some time, I did actually catch a single episode of Reporting Scotland a couple of weeks back. I have to agree with the correspondent's comments above. This "standing up" news presentation style is also dire and needs tossed in the bin now.
I wonder if Scotland Today has a new look from next week. There has been no publicity around it, which probably means it won't. However, it's in dire need of a revamp. (Love the content, hate the design) and a new head of news has just started to settle in to the new job so it would make sense to revamp it.
I agree with what was said a couple of posts back, the coverage area is too large. The central belt, on its own could fill 30 minutes of news ..... oh sorry, it already does !!! The north could fill half an hour, however the south would be a problem, I think if there was to be a separate nws programme, it would have to include much of Ayrshire.
However, there was some talk a while back of a pilot regional opt within the main Reporting Scotland programme for the south, coming from Dumfries. And I believe that the BBC in Dumfries are moving to larger premises, so maybe this opt could happen in the near future.
When BBC Scotland move to their new studios in 2006/7, I hope the programme will be greatly improved, they could have a great new look, with the real windows looking over Glasgow in the studio ( or so I've heard ), but its content that counts, and it really needs to improve. Some of the lead stories ( not at the moment anyway ) are utterly laughable.
