The idea of moving from one crime scene to another works well, if perhaps not every week. Maybe once a month or something, as imo it doesn't add anything to be at a crime scene )live for the whole show) each week. The desperate 'tune in next week to find out what happens' should not have been so, I think it was very bad taste. Seems the new producer wants to put his/ her stamp on the show, which has remained unchanged for some time, as with the changes to both crime watch and watchdog. Both have changed very little (since I can remember) however, I feel the show has lost some gravitas which Kirsty young delivered brilliantly.
It throws up other questions too. Do all crime scenes conveniently have a large open space available, closed to the general public, to stage the the kind of show put on at RAF Marham? What about when the murder/abduction happened in a terraced street of a large, heavily populated housing estate?
And what about those lead stories (of which there are many) when the actual location of the murder or disappearance is completely unknown?
I guess these are all questions criminals will have to ask themselves if they want to be featured on TV.
Anchoring a show like this on locations adds very little to it, and indeed the show probably has benefitted over the years from keeping an almost complete disconnect from the location and victims of the crime. They focus on the facts of the case, not the emotional angle.
Coming live from the street that Stephen Lawrence was murdered on was not a good idea. A child on a bike waving behind Jeremy, whilst the parent films it was not the ideal thing to have going on whilst appealing for information on a brutal murder.
Crimewatch is really awful coming from location, just shows tonight with the people carrying on in the background. In theory, it works well, but in reality it adds nothing to the overall flow of the programme. I thought the whole purpose of crimewatch roadshow was to go on location?
They need to decide what they want. A show featuring current crimes that the public can help out on, that is Crimewatch or a show featuring famous crimes and how they've been solved, that should be a totally different show altogether, then you have features about online dating and hate crime which to be quite honest feel more at home on something like The One Show.
Tonight (with all due respect of course) they spent quite a significant portion of the program on the Stephen Lawrence case, the news have been covering all day the development of a handbag strap which is enough, being LIVE at the scene of a 1993 murder and providing a full reconstruction just felt a bit unnecessary in my opinion...
"Tune in next week to find out who raped and killed this young girl"- it's all pretty crass and poor taste, isn't it?
Absolutely dreadful, and quite rightly getting a kicking in the media for it.
I can see the BBC hater tabloids having a field day over Crimewatch effectively trivialising an utterly horrible crime for entertainment.
They got savaged for this on Points of View yesterday. A reconstruction split over two weeks yielded a complaint saying "this isn't supposed to be a soap!"