BBC One East

I'm quite pleased and surprised with BBC East. Last night, they added a program to the schedule after the news followed by other programmes that was out of sync with the rest of the regions for the rest of the night. The continiuty was actually really good. Here's what happened:

Straight after the weather:
Ident: (Very smooth opt, no troubles at all. No Trailer between ident and weather) The CA says 'This is BBC One East (This is nice. Normally we get 'This is BBC One for the Eastern Counties') In half an hour, Ruby Wax meets Henry Petite (can't remember his first name), first though, Griff Rees-Jones takes a look at the last of the UK's end of the pier shows.'

The CA was actually really good. Never heard him before. Positive he wasn't a news reader.

After the pier program, we went straight into an ident, no trailers again.

It would have been nice to see how they managed to opt back into News 24. Ho Hum.

OK, gotta go.

Could they not have got a network announcer to record all the links and just play them straight after each programme?

I think that the CA voice linking into the special programming for the East last night belonged to Ian Meikle, whose voice is normally heard linking into 'The East at Westminster' and 'Matter of Fact' on BBC TWO

(I don't know if this is true, but I think that he may also work for BBC East as a sound man because a person with the same name sometimes appears in the credits for either programmes).

It could well have been Iain Meikle - he often did live continuity for Matter of Fact and The East at Westminster when I was based in Norwich - and indeed is also often to be found behind a sound desk at BBC East.

I would be interested to know what BBC One Digital looked like in the Eastern Counties. I would imagine that they were only able to delay the analogue network and re-broadcast this on both analogue and digital for the rest of the night (meaning any widescreen programme was broadcast as 14:9 letterbox in 4:3, and not full 16:9)