Coronavirus | Television News Coverage

BBC One Scotland used two idents between the PM and the FM, one for each announcement with a fade to black between

Does BBC One join the News Channel feed tonight instead of News TX1? BBC One has a ticker, which was not shown in March and May.

It seems so as they opted into Huw's continuity announcements on the news channel so it looked quite messy.

In these times of uncertainty it's nice that some things never change.

Was the PM’s announcement shown on the NC?

Yes. They had Huw in the studio after Outside Source at about 1956... BBC one opt in at 2000 with a split second of NC feed.

Having watched the 5 versions back (BBC One England, Scotland, Wales & NI + BBC Scotland):
• England, both Scotlands and Wales opted into Huw for a split second
• NI had Huw saying "Boris Johnson" out of shot over a quick fade to black after the continuity

None of the controllers avoided what I've decided to call - The Huw Trap



Indeed, if only the controller had waited for another second, it would have been almost seamless

Re: Seeing Huw

Surely it would be easier to have the PM's statement ready to go on each feed separately and had the computer press play at 2000 without cutting to Huw - which I also don't understand. Why would you (the controller) go to the news channel (or I saw it called above "News TX1" - which I presume refers to just the raw feed without the ticker or BSL interpreter?) at all - the file was presumably sitting, waiting to go because it was pre-recorded

I think noggin has said before that the playout system can take an indeterminate amount of time between the director pressing the 'take next' button and the system actually cutting to it. Which is a poor state of affairs, but it is what it is.

Channel 4 alternated between a caption saying Bake Off was on next and referring to it as a "Government Broadcast". Being pedantic, was that strictly correct for a Ministerial Broadcast?

Did World News take the Huw Edwards special?

I used to work for the company that supplied ITV’s EPG listings to Sky. It’s not possible to link ITV to ITV2 for example, or vice versa, because there are loads of regional variants of ITV and only one ITV2. There would need to be an “ITV Anglia East”, “ITV2 Wales” etc. The same principle applies to BBC channels. They could in theory link those that do have direct equivalents - BBC1 Northern Ireland to BBC2 Northern Ireland, for example - but I expect they want a consistent approach.

Sky’s hardware doesn’t support what they call “one-to-many” or “many-to-one” links, e.g. where ITV2 would link to all regional variants of ITV and the box would pick whatever one you’ve got on 103.

I note that Northern Ireland's first and deputy first ministers were the only ones to do their statements live. The NI controllers deciding to give Mark Carruthers the 20-second in-vision continuity slot with a slightly uncomfortable pan before he started speaking.

Although it did lead to one technician appearing on-camera in the swap from first to deputy first minister



Ros Atkins mentioned that they would be analysing it in the next half hour of 'the programme' (i.e. OS) so I would guess not