ITV1 Regional Continuity: A debacle?

I've been meaning to ask about this for a couple of days now, but what is going on?

In the ANGLIA region, we've had the same announcment for the regional news all weekend, it's worse than the Maggie Mash days: "Now the lastest Anglia news from your part of the region" or something like that.

Is every ITV region this bad now?

I believe Anglia News have an ident bolted onto the front of their news and therefore its the same announcement each time. Most other Granada regions don't have any ident before the regional news, it just comes straight on. It's a pitty the presenter can't do the announcement live like in the days when the IVC announcer used to read the news

To be honest I am glad that Granada ditched an ident before the News as the continuity was terrible and the ident didn't feel regional or newsy in the slightest. I still have the 6pm ident from October 28 last year and all we heard was

"This is ITV1 Granada, now Granada Reports."

It was stale and poor, but it would have sounded better if it was live and more importantly if it was regional. The national continuity isn't bad when it's live, it's just the technical cock-up's, which are constant annoy me and they seem to annoy many on this forum too.

Indeed, we had "................ S is Yorkshire on ITV1 with tonights...... Calendar". (See TV Ark they have a copy)

I'd prefer it if they got Pete Haslam or Kerrie Gosney to record all the presenter combinations and use them each night like the BBC do.

It iritates me that we get no announcement or ident into the regional news anymore. We regularly got the TTTV blue ident with the subdued music before North East tonight with no v/o although it worked as it marked the end of the ads & trailers and the start of the news hour. Nowadays we'll get a Pete Haslam OTT trailer for "The whole nine yards" then crash into the NET titles - messy imho.

The best intro I heard on TTTV shortly before nationalisation was "For the North East and North Yorkshire, this is ITV1 brought to you by Tyne Tees. Bringing you up to date with the days events across the region now, Mike Neville and the team with North East Tonight." bit much for every evening I suppose but certainly appropriate and better than what we get now!

Though the 2000 idents were far supperior - I still loved the news ident used between C3NE and the 2000 relaunch, especially the way it ran over into a view of the studio (Look North used to do this too).

Well it appears that at last Grampian / Scottish are still getting it right though being the poorer relation of SMG I guess Grampians is recorded.

At least we have a different announcement every night!!

Tsk! Typical isn't it.... we decide to do something to improve our presentation and you STILL complain!

We decided with the news relaunch recently that we would like to improve our regional continuity, seeing as it really doesn't exist anymore. And it's not great to fall out of the ad break straight into the news is it? So, off our own back we decided to give up some of our bulletin duration to start with a continuity annoucement introducing the news. We record one at the top of the titles during rehearsal.

There are several different versions available, obviously when you were watching the same one happened to be used more than once.

So you're lucky to be getting an announcement at all, and I think Anglia is to be applauded for caring enough about it's output to go to the effort to put one back in where other regions don't.

In other words, stop your moaning!

On Anglia ident today at 6 it had some text at the bottom saying something like 'For Anglia East switch to Terrestrial channel 3'. Is that always there?

Yes.

Westcountry always has an ident into the use, but not a regional one, just a network 'graphic' one. The announcement also very rarely references Westcountry News either.