How strange (odd choices in news programmes)

Well, this was the year after Angela hosted the 1977 Eurovision Song Contest - so maybe that's where the idea sprung from. Remember, in those days the host had to present in both English and French.

Question though - Was the programme directed from a2 (now France dot 2) in Paris, or from a gallery at TVC using an English and French speaking director? There's a couple of visible sync rolls at the top of some reports, which makes me think it probably was all run from Paris.
PPd'A's earpiece also looks very non uk standard at the time.

I clocked the earpiece too

This one from the early 1970s (despite the description) has oddities galore -- a rotating set, timewarp-style graphics, and a puppet on the set:

OK, I think that wins.

What the deuce?

I always thought the set pieces rotating was neat. My mother was in her 20s then and said J.P. was there for years. Rhea Feikin said JP originated because:



Worth noting she also did children’s shows before she did the weather with puppets as well.

IIRC, this was also during a time period where BBC did air French-language program for a brief spell.

A definitive product of its time.

Much to Mouseboy33's dismay, brick wall sets have been popular in the United States for the past two decades or thereabouts. But it turns out that Germany's ZDF used a brick wall way back in the 1970s:

Here's an odd on-air experiment from 1977; during the 8 p.m. news, to illustrate the importance of energy conservation, TF1's anchor instructed households across France to turn off unnecessary lights and then showed the drop in the power grid demand:

Writing about Italian television in his 1972 book The Universal Eye: World Television in the Seventies (1972), Timothy Green mentioned the unusual format of the evening news: "The main evening news, Telegiornale, on RAI's first channel, strains to satisfy every shade of the political spectrum. There are no more than six anchormen, each of whom helps to satisfy a political party that its views are adequately represented."

Here's a clip from 1968 showing that multi-anchor setup at the beginning:



In the 1980s, RAI was split on political lines. RAI Uno became controlled by the Christian Democrats, RAI Due by the Socialists, and RAI Tre by the Communists.

Having the main national news read by military personnel in uniform is certainly odd. Here's a newscast from Poland under martial law, 1981: