BBC World's HardTalk Extra

Just seen a posting in another thread, and it reminded me that I wanted to post a niggle! Here goes...what is HardTalk Extra actually supposed to be? As far as I can tell, it's just HardTalk, but with purple titles and set! I can't see anything radically different about it. They bill it on BBC World as being a culture and arts interview programme, but the normal HardTalk has covered those topics before, as well as politics, science, and just about every other topic under the Sun.

It seems to me that they're extending the HardTalk theme as far as possible, for the sake of it. There must be about five programmes now - the original HardTalk, Extra Time (formerly SportsTalk), I think there are also HardTalk India and HardTalk Pakistan (but these are only shown in South Asia), and now HardTalk Extra! Crikey, how much further can it go?

I think HardTalk Extra is supposed to be less political than the main programme - as it says on the BBC World site, "HARDtalk Extra profiles personalities from the worlds of art, entertainment and science".

I saw this yesterday and had a good chuckle. Nice purple version of the titles, but with Extra in some fancy font plonked on top. A bit of an anti-climax really, lol.

What was with the sound on tonight's episode on News 24? Forgeign language with subtitles it may have been, but surely they could have given the man a microphone!

I caught the end of that programme this morning and yes it did look rather bad and I've seen better backdrops than hotel curtains. I guess the only excuse was it was put together quickly while it was still on the news agenda.

Notice that HardTalk Extra is producded by and independant production company, cant remember the name but it can be seen on the end cap.

Hardtalk Extra is produced by "Quite Frankly" productions for the BBC. It is an independent production - helping to increase the number of independent productions on News 24 and World I suppose.

The reason for the poor sound quality, and surroundings was probably because of the unusual nature of the interview. The guest was Khaled Meshaal, who is the overall leader of Hamas. In order to interview him, the HardTalk team had to be taken to an undisclosed location in Beirut. It looked as if they were in a back room in a house of some sort, but perhaps they couldn't use their normal equipment, hence the sound quality?

But it looks very nice when it's in the National Set.

if anyone has video caps, that would be great!