CHILDREN IN NEED - 2012

Suspect many of the satellite linked OBs are being downlinked at TVC and fed to their regional centres via Raman (the BBC internal vision circuit system). Not all English Regions have satellite downlinks of their own, and are downlinked via Sat Ops at TVC.

Whether these OBs worked directly into TC1 or into their regional centre or out again I don't know. I'd kind of suspect the latter, as it would make comms potentially a bit easier if the musical bounce was close to a regional opt.

The quality variation is almost certainly due to a range of OB trucks, backhaul methods and regional galleries. There were some very compressed SD OBs with lots of PAL composite footprints, and some dreadful lighting, racking and camerawork on some, whilst others looked very nicely lit with properly matched cameras and some nice camera work.

I guess that's once people are drunk enough to fling a few texts their way without thinking. It took me a while to find it earlier in the evening though and all I found on the website was the £5 version - with about a 3 page PDF of terms and conditions for using it.

Flicked through the show this morning and as usual an over reliance on musical performers, but in a way because they only had I think one "celebrity" performer all evening (Moyles) it didn't seem so music heavy. I think they also used Pudsey much better this year then they have in the past - both Pudsey vs Pudsey and the Misery Bear sketch were brilliant, and having him on Pointless earlier and actually making him more of a character rather than just a mascot works well too. A shame though the theme seems to have now been cut to just the last few notes.

Yes I agree; it did coincide with mentions of people coming in from the pub.

Has it even been scaled back? It's in a different format now but apparently it's done quite well since the changes

And presumably around the time they started to reduce the staffing on the phone lines?

I don't think it's an outsourcing thing, as far as I know none of the regions have sold off anything or rely on outside companies that much. There might well be a financial aspect though.

I always assumed it was a quality thing - making the programme better by doing fewer crappy regional bits. For a while there were no live regional inserts at all just a few pre-made packages which looked a lot more slick

The other factor I assume is that in the 80's there wasn't a national phone number, the regions would display local phone numbers for their region*. And of course they needed to do this all night, if Pebble Mill had all gone home at 9:30 then no-one in that area would have pledged any money


*incidently in the South East one of these was for viewers in Belgium/The Netherlands

I was baffled that they didn't promote the text line earlier. Surely you want to make donating as easy as humanly possible, and what's easier than typing in a quick text. You've spent the money before you've ever thought about it.

I'm ashamed to say I'm not inclined to pick up the phone to someone, or jump on the internet. There's a lot of people even lazier than me. Make it as accessible as possible and you'll get tons of money - see Chris Moyles's Radio 1 marathon for the best way of doing this.

The show struck me as in transition this year. The balance between sad stories and entertainment was wrong - it was nigh-on 50/50, and there's only so much you can take when you're sitting in on a Friday night. Interested to hear Grimshaw was given a shot - he's always struck me as far better on TV than radio, and this could be an attempt to test him out on the BBC1 audience as either an eventual Wogan replacement or to see if he carry another show on the station.

Shame there wasn't any West End performances this year. I wonder what happened there? Normally AvenueQ turn up after midnight.

The West End production of Avenue Q closed in 2010

They probably ran out of broadcastable songs as well.

Good point, they can't have been busy. I'm sure they could have popped along to BBC Television Centre for 5 minutes to sing a song.

Well the puppets won't be busy, I'd imagine their 'helpers' are busy doing other things these days