Children In Need 2018

Didn't they try and axe the live regional opts in England one year and just had pre-recorded VTs instead. It only lasted the year IIRC.

It's a shame the likes of Doctor Who and Call the Midwife only seem to offer a trailer to the show most years now when even a 5 minute sketch would add a whole lot more. They are probably missing the things we used to moan about - the newsreaders every year and the endless plugs for Christmas albums dressed up as special performances, but in the right quantity, and not necessarily every year, they are needed. Ideally they'd have one pre-recorded feature and one live feature every hour throught the night to build the show around.

Yes - 2001 I think. Looking at Genome, reminds me that for a couple of years the regions were represented by big outdoors pop concerts, which also had the effect of breaking up the treadmill of studio performances.

Yes, in the mid 2000s there used to be two or three big staged events in the regions, organised by the main programme. These were inserts into the main show but the region who had the event in their patch also got use of the facilities for their regional opts and, in some cases, for their 1830 programme beforehand. 2005 for instance, the first year Oxford had its own tv gallery, CIN had an OB at RAF Brize Norton with Girls Aloud, Tony Christie, Status Quo and Jamie Callum. There was a full truck there and an experienced music director and crew. The national inserts were obviously of a very high standard, but the Oxford region made great use of the facilities for the 1830, the three CIN opts and recorded an item for the late bulletin.

I remember there was a very large outdoor CIN concert in Stoke-on-Trent one year in the early 00s organised by BBC Midlands that they opted to both on network and midlands.