BBC South East News, plus a Midlands question too !

Looking at http://www.tvradiobits.co.uk/, they have listings pages for various Radio Times of the past.

What has puzzled me is that London South East didn't appear to get a full news service until the mid 80's.

They already had an evening prog of some description already (London Plus etc), but listings for the odd less than 5 mins bullys done by the other regions said 'except London' !(I certainly remember Midlands Today doing bullys at around 4 pm, when I came home from school, complete with the MT announcer trailing the kids progs before reading the news)

I remember reading, on Saturdays, that other regions got a sport bully(as it was at the time), but London South East got a cartoon(Tom & Jerry ?) instead.

Did nothing major happen during the day/weekends in London?

What did they get, while everyone else was doing news(if everyone was doing news at that point!)

(I also seem to remember a cock up in the Midlands(late 70's/early 80's), where they did a continuity anno as normal into the 4pm bulletin, but could only get vision from the studio, with music on the audio.

They kept returning to the globe with an apology, then returning to the same problem with the audio, but, I could be wrong here, the same guy was doing OOV continuity & in vision news.

In other words, you could hear him on the globe, but not when it swopped to the news studio !

Does my memory cheat, or did something similar happen ?)

This was more in the 70's - in the days of Nationwide (and its replacement, Sixty Minutes) the early evening local news was just presented by the Nationwide presenters. Except for the times when Nationwide was off air and 'South East at Six' was broadcast there were no other South East bulletins and no seperate South East newsroom. According to some schedules I've seen the lunch time regional news was replaced in London with business news.

Later there were South East bulletins in Breakfast Time. But it was only after the demise of Sixty Seconds (1983ish) that a a seperate South East news service was started - the evening programme being called London Plus, the bulletins just being 'South East'. It came from the former Nationwide facilities (and presumably some of the same staff) at Lime Grove.

There's a very good page about this on TV Ark: http://www.btinternet.com/~rob.frowen/bbclondonandsoutheastnews.html

As author of that site, let me expand...

Until around the mid 1980s London and the South East was not considered to be a region at all by the BBC - so there was no regional programming. I assume it was the slightly big-headed attitude that if a news story happened in London, then it was important enough to be considered national news.



While I well remember coming home from school and sitting watching five minutes' worth of a menu showing some balloons, detailing that afternoon's children's programmes with some rather fab music (the Abba medley springs to mind!) totally unaware that this was only going out in the South East, and everyone else had broken off for regional news.

The lunchtime update in News After Noon was indeed replaced by financial news, and also a recap of the headlines with subtitles. On Saturdays we did get a five minute sports news, but it wasn't regionally branded in any way. The Tom and Jerry cartoons would pop up on bank holidays and around Christmas time, when, because there was no Nationwide for a week or so, there would be no South East regional news for the whole period!

London Plus appeared in 1984, and it was in 1985 that the lunchtime and early afternoon bulletins appeared. Also, at this time the South East got its first ever regional ident!

I discuss the history of the region's news more on the BBC South East page on my site: http://www.nascr.net/~rgwill/southeast.htm

Also the South East region, even when it did appear, was effectively still part of BBC Current Affairs and based at Lime Grove. London Plus was directed by Current Affairs directors, and produced by Current Affairs staff, rather than being a "regional" affair. It was only with the move of the South East studio(s) and staff to BBC Elstree that the region finally split.

Initially BBC South East was part of the BBC South and East macro region, along with BBC East in Norwich, and a number of programmes were produced for both regions - such as Weekend. However the macro regions were re-thought quite quickly in the late 80s/early 90s, and Elstree moved into the BBC South region, and Norwich into the BBC Midlands and East region.

Can somebody explain why Oxfordshire gets South Today when it is on a latitude north of the City of London?

And should not Oxfordshire be in a Midlands (South) region rather than a South (Oxford) region?

Is not Oxford closer culturally, geographically, and socially closer to Birmingham than Southampton?

Oxfordshire used to be in the South East Region - but the South East Region was too large IMO to cover news from all corners of it. It broke away from the South East to join South Today - it has more news in Oxfordshire than it did in Newsroom South East...

Isn't Oxfordshire part of Central News South?...perhaps its the way the BBC wants it...

I think the BBC ought to make an Oxford-based (or Abingdon-based) South Midlands Today region, matching the Central News (South) region.

Presumably that would involve pinching the far south of the Midlands Today region (e.g. Herefordshire (?); northern Gloucestershire etc) and adding it to the area that currently gets South Today sub-opt (which isn't just strictly Oxfordshire, I think it also includes the likes of west/northwest Buckinghamshire, east/northeast Wiltshire, extreme south/southwest of Northamptonshire etc).

If this were to happen, Birmingham would have to rename as West Midlands Today , I would expect (?).

Cheers guys.

Good idea, but I'd think that Cheltenham and Gloucester would be better served by moving it into the current BBC Points West / HTV West area.. geographically, Cheltenham and Gloucester are nearer to the existing West/HTV West coverage area towns and cities than they are to those in the Oxford South Today area. Just a quick mosey on down the M5 and you're in Bristol in round about half an hour......

Maybe the existing 1KW C5 transmitter at Churchdown Hill, just outside Gloucester could be re-jigged and expanded to broadcast Points West/HTV West to those towns and put them firmly into the West broadcast area, rather than having some parts of both towns receiving one region and other parts receiving another.

Speaking as someone who lives in the area, yes, regional news coverage for Gloucestershire is atrocious. I can count the number of news stories about events in my neck of the woods in the past couple of years on one hand.

From a purely news point of view, it would make much more sense if we got programming from Bristol - in fact, quite a lot of people a few miles away get HTV West and Points West from the BBC - or HTV Wales and Wales Today. But unfortunately, being only two miles away from the St. Briavels booster, which relays a signal from Ridge Hill, we can only get Central - I can't pick up HTV at all, even though I have a mate three miles away in the other direction who gets perfect HTV but no Central (and a similar state of affairs exists on BBC, although I'm not sure how the transmitter network operates for them).

But speaking as an avid Midlands Today viewer, the idea of being deprived of Nick Owen (and Kay) is far too traumatising to contemplate!

The Oxford transmitter was historically a BBC South East regional source - it only split away from Newsroom SouthEast after the "BBC South East and London review" - which also created the BBC South East region at Tunbridge Wells.

The Oxford transmitter was deemed too small to support a full 30 minute opt - so had to be added as a sub-opt to an existing region, or added to an existing region. AIUI editorial pilots of a West Midlands+Oxford sub-opt, a Cambridge+Oxford full-programme, a London + Oxford sub-opt and a Southampton+Oxford sub-opt were carried out. Editorially it was deemed that the Southampton+Oxford combination worked the best - partially because of the similar editorial concerns and overlap with the North East BBC South region (Reading, Maidenhead, Newbury etc) such as transport, policing (Thames Valley Police covers both areas) etc. Sadly a BBC Thames Valley region was not seriously considered (too expensive to create a fully new region I guess, plus the fact the Hannington transmitter actually penetrates further South than many think)

Surely though (using my plan as mentioned above), you'd get them on Sky or as a second option on Freeview or equivalent? I think Sutton Coldfield is receivable from Cheltenham and Gloucester as well as Ridge Hill and Lark Stoke.....