New BBC One North

With all due respect to some posters on here, I honestly don't know why people are getting this impression. In an announcement which also mentioned new local radio stations for Wolverhampton and Bradford, how can it possibly mean they're going to merge the entire North of England into one region with a single news programme (while, presumably, keeping individual shows for places like the Channel Islands and the South East)? It clearly doesn't mean that at all.

Think it of like the ITV regions, half are played out in London and half in Leeds. Twenty years ago, before national continuity, all the Granada stations were played out from Leeds with the same announcer heard on all them, and sometimes they'd show the same programmes across all the stations - but they all had their own individual identities and individual programmes as well. For that, read BBC1 North.



Well, I am reminded here of Roger Mosey's comment in his book about when he became Head of Sport, where he said that when he started, whenever he asked what could be done to improve things at BBC Sport, he always got the same answer from the staff - give them loads more money to buy the rights to loads more stuff. Which was obviously true, but of course every other department at the Beeb was asking for the same thing.

If I recall the plan was for the Inside Out replacement was for the northern regions to have a combined editorial area edition, which would fit those requirements.

If anything it may make it easier for BBC Yorkshire to get a 30 minute doc to get commissioned to play out on Leeds and Hull through BBC North than having to squeeze it in when network schedules filler like A Question of Sport.

Red Bee was the privatised BBC Presentation department. Originally everyone involved in the playout of the BBC channels were BBC staff and they did everything.

Over time that's changed, their scope is a lot smaller and quite a few bits have been brought in house including announcers and playout editors - the latter have editorial responsibility for the channels. A few things they used to do have been made obsolete by the move to file based delivery - they don't do much media management either I believe. The BBCs promo making also came in house

I'd have thought the new northern version would come out of Red Bee rather than in house as it would be a lot cheaper and simpler than setting up and running a new playout area of the sort that the nations have

BBC One had Cuffs a few years back which didn't work out as well as HolbyBlue so not sure if a police based drama is likely. I'd like to see a family based drama similar to Where the Heart is or the Australian series Packed to the Rafters.

As I explained to Roger, it's very unlikely that North West Tonight or the three Look North's are going anywhere, but will share a common network feed from Salford which is tailored for the north of England which allows the existing regions to opt-out when necessary. (NE&C could have a doco on, while NW, Yorkshire and Y&L could have network programming).

For all we know, BBC One North may be just "BBC One" as it is currently, but with a different CA and some trailers which are targeted at northern audiences.

The current network feed for the English regions which is also based in Salford, shared with White City would continue to provide the overall network playout for which the new BBC One North and the nations would continue to opt into

That would be my parents' dream. To this day, they still refer to NWT as "Look North". Such a rename of NWT would solve a great many problems!


I totally agree with this. I'm in Liverpool and pretty much struggle to have anything in common with Manchester, let alone York or Newcastle. Over t'other side o' Pennines is practically a foreign country to me! And London feels like it's on a different continent altogether.

I think this is an interesting idea. I’m intrigued as to how much difference there’ll actually be between the network feed and the North one.

“After’t One Show it’s whippet racing live from Wigan with Dickie Bird”

I wonder if it’ll lead to some “rationalisation” of the nations at the same time?

The north does share some common aspects. Public transport is awful compared to the South of England, politically until the 2019 election, they were more likely to vote for Labour (there are of course pockets where other parties perform well) and all share that power isn't equally distributed compared to London. Lincolnshire (part of Y&L) was one of the most pro Leave areas of the UK.

The same argument that people don't have anything in common with their neighbours is just as common in London where there's zero affinity between someone who lives in Croydon and another in Enfield as there is between the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester.

Is levelling up the country as a strategy unique to the UK to move jobs and businesses from the capital/major city to other parts of the country or has it been done elsewhere?

As far as I know BBC One in the North of England does already show some alternative programming, like the Super League Show, so probably is this going to be a simple officialization of what is already happening. Also just today Duncan Newmarch, the BBC1 announcer has wrote on Twitter saying that already today a handful of BBC announcers already work/broadcast from studios in Salford. he said that all of the network announcements done this morning on BBC One Network were done in Salford, so as London Lite said, could this really be just a confirmation of how things are right now? And that maybe the 3 northern regions will just opt-out for a few programmes, using the Salford announcers already heard on BBC One Network?

The higher echelons of BBC management still think 'Humberside' is a place - it lasted 21 years and was abolished on 1st April 1996 so its been gone nearly 25 years now. They have no concept of the 'north' other than they have a base in Manchester (which is spelt Salford). If they want to really commission things from other parts of the country they will have stop making decisions at north London dinner parties.

To be fair, Radio Humberside launched three years before the county existed. Also, the police and fire service also still use the Humberside name.