Have ITV got worse since nationalisation?

Well, Trish used to do one Saturday early a month, together with her six lates.

The rest of the earlies were mainly a mixture of Andrea Simmons and Roger Tilling, plus any other odd freelances, here and there.

Roger also did the main late shift cover if Trish or Glen were off for any reason.

(All this based on just four weekends a month, yes, I know there were five some months, the rota just slipped forward a week.)

Yes we do seem to be hearing a lot more of Glen at the moment - not that I am complaining!

I am just surprised that they are using freelancers still so much considering the main team is now complete and the fact that overnights are now recorded.

Saying that everyone has to have a holiday!

Interesting tonight whilst watching ITV1 London at 6 - they seem to now use a recorded announcement like the rest of the country into the main 6.00 regional news - is this new? I thought the main network announcer just flicked the switch and spoke to the London area (of the course in the old days of Carlton London and LWT it was the other way round - local continuity all the time unless it was an occasional flick to network feed).

In fact ITV1 London tonight had three announcers in half an hour:

5.30 Glen - National
5.55 Out Of 'I Want That House' - Sasha Twining - regional announcer
6.00 London Tonight - Graham Rogers voiceover
6.30 Back to network with Glen

In the midlands we had Sasha introducing Central News at Six.

Just my oberservations!

I think the old "button 1" and "button 2" are currently residing in that skip, round the back of Kent House, down by the river, Steve!

So have we got Glen looking after us all weekend Nick?

I have not watched much of ITV recently, since the Presentation has gone considerably worse since the move to LNN...e.g a commercial break run in the middle of a ITN LUNCHTIME NEWS item to be followed by a long black & silence-- Announcements often run out of order. etc.
Wonder if the ITV1-Wales will dissapper when Carlton & Granada merge.
I don't think that can be far away.

Yes and doesn't all of this go against the whole term and meaning of the word "Continuity"....because, quite simply, their isn't any!!

Good Point!

It's certainly been a London Weekend what with Trish on daytime today!

I can't believe it's been 11 months since we said cheerio to regional continuity.

Any ideas what ex-regional announcers are doing?

I know Ted May works occasionally for Channel 5 and no doubt continues his lucrative voiceover work.

I gather Mark Lipscomb is still reading news on Central South at the weekends - but I haven't heard him freelancing on ITV1 for ages.

So shall we start a where are they now?

This might be mentioned elsewhere, but that Next thing which pops up in the corner of the screen doesn't really make sense.

It reads:

ITV1 MILLIONAIRE

There's no mention of "Next"!

There was a nice cock-up from LNN tonight at 8.50pm, just after the F1. Basically it was a VT Clock counting down from 1 Minute, but Leeds opted out after about 20 seconds, don't know what happened in the rest of the country, but something I haven't seen before. I assume they forgot to play out a trailer or something.

Was there a VT clock, I only noticed the prolonged black screen. Leeds went with the ads after about 5 secs and then joined the pre-Corrie ident about 5 secs late "Boudica but now Coronation Street"

Yup, there was a VT clock from the F1 side of the break, it had LNN something on it and lines to represent where 4:3 and 14:9 would be cut off at.

No, remember it's still a network of diffrent stations just like it always has been and the networking arrangement remain no matter who owns it.

A Carlton-Granada company could no more refuse to provide programmes or presentation than Thames or any other ITV company could