Newsreader buys a day with himself . . .

Sky's Bob Friend pay £100 for a mystery lot at an auction the other day only to discover a tour of Sky Centre - by himself - was the prize!

On discovering this, Friend sold it to the person sitting next to him for £50.

Yeah I read about that as well!

Did you also hear that Bob was approached by the 'This Morning' team as a replacement for Richard & Judy?

Cheers, Asa

He would be hilarious because he really wouldn't know anything about his guests.

Bob Friend & Anna Botting could present joined by Simon Bates. (As long as they didn't leave Sky!)

(Edited by SkyNews at 10:39 pm on July 20, 2001)

Yeah, can you imagine Bob talking about make-up, fashion and Viagra?! Actually, come to think of it, that would be brilliant - someone hire him!

Also, where has he gone?! It must be a long break he's taking!!

Bob always gets guests wrong.
Calling Jethro Tull, Vic Reeves is a nice example.
Where was the report about this? Was it the PA by any chance?

No matter how bad Bob Friend is when it comes to popular culture, he can't be any worse than Martin Stanford and Paula Whateverhernameis the other night when they were previewing the papers. One of the tabloids had the Paul/Helen Big Bro thing on the front page, with the headline '3 days to do it' or something similar. Paula says 'I don't know what that's all about'. Martin then asks 'Paul and Helen? Are those the two that are friends?'. Paula then snaps 'I don't know. I don't watch it'. Pure comedy.

Paula had the most fantastic interview with Johno Boardman (sp) the other week.
She basically insulted him the entire way through, whilst laughing her head off.
I'm not sure whether Paula is staying at Sky News or not. I think she may have been brought in as a temporary to replace Sheila Jansen and or Fiona McDiarmid, but I actually like her now and hope she remains as a regular presenter.

Paula's been floating around for a while - generally filling in for people here and there. I think she used to be Anna Botting's stand-in on News at Ten, but I may be wrong. While we're talking about presenter line-ups, though, has anyone else noticed that quite a lot of new faces are popping up at the moment. Various pairings are being tried out all over the place - Martin Stanford has done several different shifts in the past few days, and with different co-presenters. Looks like the duty rotas have gone crazy!

Could this be because the relaunched Sky News will have more shifts (due to the lack of feature programmes)? For example, 6-10am, 10-1, 2-4 etc. I know that the rolling schedule is already in place, but maybe they haven't quite sorted presenters out yet. Chris Rogers (ex-newsround) could well be a rising star on the channel - a bit of 'youth' to appeal to a younger audience, perhaps?!

This would be a good schedule for Sky to adopt.

Weekdays:
6am-9am - Sunrise
Martin Stanford and Natasha Kaplinsky

9-12am - Not sure what they could call this, News On The Hour just sounds too boring though. Perhaps NewsLine, they've had NewsLine in the past or perhaps Morning Line or something interesting.
Sheila Jansen and Frank Partridge

12am-4pm - Sky News Today
Bob Friend and Anna Botting

4pm-8pm with Kay Burley and Jeremy Thompson - Not sure about this one really, Perhaps the 4-30pm programme could just be News On the Hour or Sky News Live and the world news programme as Sky News International, which they launched and closed down again 3 days later!!
then Live at Five, then at 6pm News Line, a news and call in programme and then from 7 until 9 they can have Prime Time again.

8-12pm
Simon McCoy and Vivien Creegor. Simon and Viv can take over Prime Time at 8pm until 9 when someone can present the nine o'clock.
Then from 11-12pm they could try a night programme with a review of political matters and the famous paper review as well as news.

Weekends:
Sunrise from 6-9am with Fiona McDiarmid and Lorenzo, if they can drag him away from Sky Sports

9-12
Allan King and Emily Maitlis, I rarely watch this shift so I don't like either of these presenters

12-4
Paula Middlehurst and Rob Curling, again they would need to get Rob from Sky Sports, but i'm sure they wouldn't mind.

4-8pm
Gordon Radley and Carrie Fraise (sp), she is also from Sky Sports!

8-12pm Mark Longhurst and Lisa Aziz.
You can't put Mark with Fiona because they don't get on and Jeremy and Lisa appear to really hate each other.

So, there we have it, the solution to all of Sky's problems!

the 6-7 phone in show sounds interesting. what if they brought back talkback? It had a more catchier theme than your call.

CNN have recently changed the names of their programmes to incorporate the 'live' theme - CNN Live at Daybreak, CNN Live This Morning, CNN Live Today etc. And MSNBC use 'MSNBC Live' for their entire daytime programming. I think Sky should name their programmes like this...

6-9: Sky News Sunrise (preferably with its own look!)
9-12: Sky News Live This Morning
12-5: Sky News Live Today
5-7: Sky News Live at Five
7-9: Sky News Live Tonight
9: Nine o'clock news
9.30-10: Sky News Live Tonight
10-10.30: News at Ten
10.30-12: Sky News Live - Late Edition (with political wrap, papers etc)
12-6: Sky News Live - Nightline

But maybe they'll want to want to extend the use of the 'Sky News First' slogan - ie all programmes called Sky News First except for Sunrise, Today, Live at Five, Nine & Ten. Not a bad idea...

Fox News also have Fox News Live throughout the day.
I rather liked the old CNN names, CNN Early Edition, CNN Morning News etc.
But they do look a lot better now, especially with the new astons, which are just excellent.
CNN have also launched the 'CNN First Evening News', which I haven't seen yet.
If you look at the viewing figures, branded programmes nearly always get higher audience figures than their non branded counterparts.
For example, the 10am edition of Sunrise always gets more viewers than the 11am edition of News On the Hour, but when they decided to rename part of Sunrise during the election as 'News Conferences' the ratings went much higher.
Sky News Live This Morning does sound a bit of a mouthful, I don't think they will try the 'live' theme just yet, not sure about 'First' either.
They are making a big thing about Sky News First, but it just sounds a little bit tacky to me. Especially that trailer with Natasha Kaplinsky saying, 'That's why we say... Sky News First', it's just awful.