New Meridian, BBC South & South East Thread

A little more info about Meridian Thames Valley…

The title sequence has most of the same images as the existing pan-West titles, albeit reshuffled into a slightly different order. The omissions are: No Brighton Pier, no Spinnaker Tower, no marching soldiers, and no Needles Lighthouse on the endcap.

The replacement images are: Punting by the Magdalen Bridge on the River Cherwell in Oxford, the Mini motor car factory production line, the Maiwand Lion statue in Reading, and the Oracle shopping centre (Kennet riverside entrance) in Reading on the endcap.

The “South Coast” edition of the programme still uses the existing pan-West titles, despite many of the images being from the Thames Valley. Surely there are plenty of things that they could have replaced them with, such as Durdle Door and Corfe Castle for example?

The post-6:10pm part of the programme continues to use the South Coast-centric Needles Lighthouse version of the logo on the side plasmas. Boo. Why not a collage of both the Needles and the Oracle? Or even an entirely different singular image, such as the King Alfred statue in Winchester?

The Thames Valley titles for you:

Thanks Rob.

Anyone know if Meridian now have a base in the Thames Valley following the moving out of Abingdon last year.

At some point in the past fortnight, they did a DTL with a reporter/correspondent "in our Didcot newsroom". I was shocked when I heard that, as I had no idea that they'd left Abingdon.

Serious technical problems at BBC South this morning.

https://twitter.com/tomhepworthtv/status/390722075704311808

Slightly different start to South Today Oxford tonight.

Normally, the final opening headline before the title sequence is a pre-recorded insert by the Southampton edition's presenter, including a brief shot of them sat at the Southampton studio desk.

Tonight however, the Oxford studio presenter (Victoria Cook tonight) read out all of the opening headlines. The final of which was a helicopter shot of the Portsmouth Shipyard area, with Victoria Cook's voice telling us that we'd be joining Sally Taylor later for news about today's shipyard closure announcement.

On past occasions, even if the Southampton edition is an OB, the anchor has pre-recorded a headline insert on location for the Oxford opening to use (for example, this was the case when the A3 Hindhead tunnel opened in 2011).

When the Oxford sub-opt ended, Victoria Cook threw to Tony Husband in the Southampton studio for "more news from around the region". We joined him at the start of a story, and it was clear that it was not simultaneous to the Sally-to-Tony throw that viewers south of the Ridgeway would have seen. Rather, we were clearly already at least one-story-in to Tony's bit of the programme.

EDIT: Weather forecast at about 6:47pm, and we "Oxford" viewers didn't finally see/hear Sally Taylor until about 6:50pm. Tony threw "back" to Sally, despite the fact that such a description was incorrect for us northernmost viewers who hadn't seen Sally at all thus far.

Sally T is presenting from the Pompy DTL broom cupboard, cleverly tarted up to look like a proper studio.

First story from Tony H was the Horsham pharmaceutical company possible closure

Cheers for info.

Ah, we got that story first too!

So, Oxford's closing sting must have been utterly simultaneous to the Sally-to-Tony throw then! Slick timing!

Did Sally and/or Tony make an obvious slight pause, like they were waiting for Oxford viewers to opt-in?

EDIT: Seeing the Pompy broomcupboard tonight means that, for once, the Oxford studio wasn't the smallest studio space seen during the programme!

I don't recall a slight pause at the opt in point, but I suspect at the end of the show Oxford's gallery was given a clean feed of the Pompy output, rather than the 'dirty' Sot'on output ?

Nope - dirty Southampton output as usual - just down to timing and preparation for the opt-in point to happen when it was supposed to have happened

South Today Oxford was quickly aborted tonight, due to technical gremlins.

The top story was a live OB from the scene of a breaking story, which went perfectly well. Studio presenter Jerome Sale then introduced the 2nd story, but it froze on the first frame of the report, so was quickly abandoned for the time being.

Jerome did a good job of keeping things going, but there was some unavoidable hesitations, awkward silences, stares etc, as he read out the 3rd story from his paper script.

He apologised for the technical problems, and threw to the Southampton/Sally Taylor version of the programme. Rather than the usual closing sting and music, a static and silent South Today logo caption was on screen for an uncomfortably long few moments, and then we cut abruptly to Southampton at the beginning of particular passage of voiceover within a report package.