BBC News Studios

It looks larger than some of the BBC regional news studios. Look East for example without the wide angle lenses is tiny:




The most likely use of backup facilities will be for much more mundane reasons, which wouldn't necessarily even be reported on - like power cuts / infrastructure failures. Obviously there'll be plenty of backup of those types of things at BH, but you still need to know what happens if they fail too (example would be a fire in a plant room taking out several systems).

Could they not get one of the nations/a region with one of the larger studios takeover? Presumably everyone at BBC News; World, National, NC, Programmes, Nations or Regions, can see each others ENPS? So, in theory, BBC NI could access the NC ENPS with the VT's scripts etc, feed it into their systems and run a skeleton operation there?

Having access to the scripts / clips is useless if BH is out of use and so there's nobody there to write them and compile the reports, and most (all?!) regions / nations won't have enough staff on standby to come in and take over the workload of the entire BBC News operation.

A backup requires a lot more than a studio and access to scripts. Access to lines, playout, comms, libraries, staff, edit facilities, and endless other things. Primary advantage of Millbank is it's location - good connectivity to the rest of the world and easy for BBC News staff to get there from BH.

When they went to Millbank after the IRA bomb they were in MB1, with the dingy grey Dateline London set. Presumably because they only had the one set of cameras and they had last been used in the studio so that's what they could get on air easiest.

In terms of other BBC Centres taking over, I suspect it depends on the time of day - there is the potential to stay in Salford if an issue develops at BH around Breakfast time, much like they stayed in TC7 for a bit before going to Millbank when they had a power cut during Breakfast which took out N6/8

In Studio E that features the London skyline, it always appears that during nighttime, the sky in London seems to be dark blue in color. Forgive if it may sound ignorant, but from where I come from, the sky never looks dark blue at night. Is there some kind of color edit done to the image or is London's sky really dark blue at night? For me, the sky is always black at night.

I might be making this up but I think I read somewhere that Studio E and the Newsroom Studios are on a different circuit to Studios A-D so that in the event of a Power Cut they could keep at least one studio going. Of course if that is true they could temporarily move World into the WS Studio.

The reason it isn't black is because if something is black on any screen it becomes slightly reflective particularly in a TV Studio where when a screen is black you'dd just end up with a reflection of all the lights which wouldn't look good at all.

That makes some sense. So the dark blue color of the sky I can safely say is rendered via computer editing right? I've always been intrigued at how there's a place in the world where the sky is really dark blue at night, seems more like one of those arctic places that give strange lights at night.

Without editing, it'd be just like the studio in Singapore where they report Newsday the the first hour around 6am, it's like pitch black. Although that is an actual window, as opposed to Studio E's panel display, so it doesn't reflect that much 'light noises' I reckon.

It's Studio C that has the fake London background - Studio E is the domestic studio with the newsroom backdrop.



It certainly makes sense - back in the days when Radio 1 was based in the original continuity area at BH they fell off air briefly during Simon Mayo's breakfast show due to a power cut. Their other con stayed powered, so Mayo was able to move there, with the next show (I think it was Mike Read sitting in for Simon Bates who was on his Round the World trip) who were preparing being kicked out.

I don't know whether the two cons were on different circuits or whether just one of them was generator supported.

There are generators in the building, and I would be very surprised if they didn't also have two independently fed national grid supplies to guard against power cuts, especially with the BBC's history of power supply issues!



It's not so much reflectivity that's the problem, but contrast. The actual screen will be a dark grey rather than black, and this means you can't have something there that is actually black. Consider a projection screen - if it's being projected on you can see the light and dark areas, and work out what's being shown. If it's not, then it's just a big white panel on the wall. With the LED screen in C, if you don't illuminate the screen, it'll appear as a big grey box rather than a depiction of a black area.

It's worth having a read of Jim Mann's blog about how he came up with the blue highlights for the domestic 10 - the blue tint is working on the same principle for similar reasons.

That was part of the problem at TV Centre - it was built with two independent power feeds, but when Battersea Power Station was closed the electricity board could only supply a single feed. (according to http://www.tvstudiohistory.co.uk/tv%20centre%20history.htm)

Electric companies playing silly buggers isn't that unusual! I know of a venue which was supposed to have two independent grid feeds, but unbeknownst to them someone at the supplier had tied them together upstream, so when the inevitable power cut happened, both feeds were lost and off went the power.