BBC North West Tonight

I'm sure there will be many Salfordians who would disagree.

Both Manchester and Salford are cities in their own right. The local government 'animal' that was Greater Manchester County ceased to exit quite a while ago; so there is no legitimate reason for branding a programme from MediaCity as anything other than either 'BBC Salford' (as appears to be the case with QoS) or 'BBC North' (although that really creates confusion with anything Leeds-based.

I remember back in the 90s they tried to re-brand:
* BBC North West as 'BBC North'
* BBC North (Leeds) as 'BBC North East'
* BBC North East (Newcastle) also as 'BBC North'

It was during an era of using a stylised 'N' in the local news programmes, and variations on the same theme tune for all three. Although Look North (Leeds)'s N formed up into a compass point, from what I remember.

http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/bbc_northeast/bbc_ne_images/news/looknorth_1991a-01.jpg
http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/bbc_northwest/bbc_nw_images/news/nwt_talbot_1993a-01.jpg
http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/bbc_yorkshire/bbcy_images/news/looknorth_1990a-01.jpg
(from TV Ark)

It was all quietly dropped, and the regions reverted to their former names.

That could indicate that the commissioning team internally was based in Manchester for Series 1, and London for the other series.

I am absolutely certain that many Salfordians would disagree. But lets face it, local government or not, Greater Manchester is still very much alive. Plus, it's the home of Radio Manchester, Media City is literally within walking distance of Central Manchester and the border within spitting distance. Plus much of it looks onto Central Manchester. Like it or not, Salford isn't a well known place either so when down the lines are done on BBC World or even on national news do we use Salford or Manchester which is universally known? Perhaps maybe Manchester is used along side Salford in a similar way to Central London and Westminster?

From Kate's twitter

http://yfrog.com/z/khhwannj

be nice to see how the new set looks tomorrow, from that photo we saw the other month it looks smaller

That looks so sad! I'm not in Granadaland (or BBC equivalent) at the moment so would appreciate caps if possible. I know someone will anyway, so thank you in advance!! Exciting

From the very brief 'wide' shot during breakfast, the new set theyre using for the Breakfast opts looks a bit on the cramped side.

I didn't get any caps, but it looks like they are using a small studio for Breakfast updates. The first broadcast wasn't so clean, a few mistakes but it is only the first day

Yes that's the small NWT breakfast/News Channel contributor studio.

http://i42.tinypic.com/izsxg1.jpg

No more weird wonky-looking overlayed clock!

I'm not sure how it looked previously, but I did see a bit of a wonky-looking overlaid clock - just before the opt at 0757, they'd apparently already gone into circuit, and there was a small 'bite' taken out of one of the corners of the Breakfast clock - as if they'd overlaid the local one a few pixels to the right and above where it should have been.

There was also a second or two of BBC London before they opted back, so perhaps the countdown was a wee bit awry.

The overlayed clock was still wonky, you could see a bit of the Network clock at the side of the NW one, but other than that all the graphics seemed quite flash for the 9am bulletin.

Worth noting the picture of Salford in the background was moving, whether it was a live shot I don't know, but it's not been very bright around this neck of the woods this morning.