'The top of the hour'. A hellish spawn followed latewr by some news channels referring to half past the hour as the 'bottom of the hour'! What a stunning example of innovative imagination!
"Top of the hour" is used by the likes of CNN and Sky to get round the problem of having viewers in different time zones...but I agree...it sounds like something Tony Blackburn said in 1964 on piratre radio!
"And that's the way it is." (CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite)
"Goodnight!" **giant smile** (CBC National News with Knowlton Nash)
"Thanks for watching." **disinterested scowl** (CBC National News with Peter Mansbridge)
"And that's the kind of day it's been." **vacant gaze** (CTV National News with Lloyd Robertson)
"From all of us here at NBC News, goodnight." (NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw)
"That's our broadcast for tonight." (ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings)
What they say...
"Fred Bloggs has been watching the story"
What they mean...
"We're too cheap to actually send a reporter out to cover this, so here's a report cobbled together from a bit of file footage by someone sitting at a desk in London."
Argh yes something about ITV News that annoys me... they say ''So and so has been following events''. Biggest offenders include Gary Cotterill, Emma Kennedy, Dan Rivers, Philip Raey-Smith and Catherine Jacob.
My all-time favourite news sign-off was used by Walter Cronkite in the States - "And that's the way it is...."
Not really a news sign-off, but at the end of Time & Again (a modern-history documentary series based around archive clips) on MSNBC, Jane Pauley used to say : "That was Time & Again... and we're history"
And John Craven *nearly* always used to sign off from Newsround with the same words spoken with the same inflection and rhythm : "And that's all from Newsround today, we'll be back at the same time tomorrow. Until then, goodbye" (diddley-diddley-dum - diddleydiddleydiddleydiddley-DUM!)