Changes to BBC Parliament & Political Programming

Regarding the clip used on The Last Leg - I think it's a grey area and it's all down to context. The clip used contained a funny moment from parliament which was being shown and presented as-is, I think this is ok with the rules. If it was a serious clip that they were making fun of, then that would be against the rules. Making fun = BAD, Containing fun = GOOD...

The clip which kicked it off on Last Week Tonight was a montage of clips of the speaker calling MPs out in funny/very British ways - so probably bad.

Looking at the actual rules (link below), no light-entertainment or political satire programmes can use footage (6a) but programmes CAN use footage if they are "magazine" type shows that also have "music or humorous features" as long as "the different types of item are kept separate" (6b).

Last Week Tonight and HIGNFY would be stopped by rule 6a but The Last Leg would be able to go ahead provided they respected rule 6b.

Rules: https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright-parliament/pru-licence-agreements/

Would it not just open up even more ‘out of context soundbite’ politics, or indeed fake news of different clips spliced together?

Politicians are all guilty of that themselves though now - far more so than any TV show has ever been.

I've never seen the Politics Live set like this, although I've never watched Laws and Ladies.

Bit random but BBC Parliament is currently trending 8th on Twitter which must be a first for the channel!

A slightly unusual programme on BBC Parliament at the moment, highlights of the No Confidence debate from 1979 to mark its 40th anniversary, using audio from the House of Commons and some stock photographs of whoever's speaking.

Of course the House of Commons wasn't actually televised until 1989 (though they'd discussed it since 1959 apparently), though the microphones were first installed in 1950 and the first live radio broadcasts weren't until 1975, so Parliament don't really have a lot to go on for this ,so it's different, I'll grant it that.

I'm surprised they haven't added in-vision subtitles/transcript rather than just going with the same still for minutes at a time. The text is all in Hansard, so it wouldn't have required manual transcribing.

That said, it doesn't appear that it has been subtitled - is this the first pre-recorded BBC programme to lack them in some time?

Hansard isn't necessarily a record of what was actually said in the house, but rather a record of what was meant to be said. Even so it would probably be a decent starting point.

BBC Parliament is exempt (on audience share grounds) from the "100% subtitles" requirement that the other BBC TV stations have, though of course they do provide it live for most live house broadcasts and some other stuff too so they are doing far more than they have to.

Someone should tell Chris Moyles on Radio X then.
Reading the 'rights' document, he is constantly playing a clip of Speaker Bercow shouting "Order" with no context and laughing about it, the repeated usage therefore could be argued is 'entertainment' and therefore illigal.

The document doesn't really refer to radio usage - there are a few references to "televised coverage" but mostly to 'broadcast' which would cover both.

The first sentence of the Definition at the start of the document refers to television specifically though, so perhaps it's been interpreted as not applying to radio at all.

Not sure what the rule is exactly, but when I’ve mixed radio pieces / packages (although it’s been a while now) my understanding was that no ‘internal editing’ of audio from Parliament was allowed. Often the reporter would use a short link to link two clips (ie “The Prime Minister though was just getting going”). We got round it once by using a fade out and a fade back in to make it clear there had been a cut. Making an edit blindingly obvious goes against all your instincts and the way you try to work the rest of the time!

In TV packages they’ll throw in a cutaway or some kind of flash to clearly separate two clips of Parliament.