South West England & CI Thread

Doesn't one corner of the Jersey studio have approximately a quarter-cylindrical glass wall eating into the otherwise square/rectangular studio space, due to a spiral staircase (albeit that it's kept out of camera shot)?

Who bloody wants everything to look exactly the same????????? I certainly don't!

London looks totally different to the South West in terms of geography and is very different in quality of life terms, so why shouldn't there be differences between BBC London & Spotlight? I don't understand this obsession with making everything look the same. You can keep a corporate style and yet things can be slightly different.

Couldn't agree more. I think the BBC has it about right. The red/white/grey colour pallet provides a "uniform" enough basis for the whole "instantly-recognisable-as-being-BBC-news" thing to work, but there's also enough variation from region to region etc.

With ITV London and Granada now having moved away from the constraints of utter unwavering uniformity, I hope that more ITV regions (as appropriate) will move towards a slightly looser approach to the otherwise generic look, a la BBC.

I imagine that, to a non-"pres fan" viewer, the Look Hull studio probably seemed "identical" to the Nationals in the latter-most N6 era. I'm not a fan of such indistinguishableness.

The other thing to remember is that most people only watch one regional BBC or ITV news show - they don't compare different regional programmes. So whether Hull differs from Plymouth is largely irrelevant, as long as they both link enough with the networked national news to look coherent.

Totally irrelevant. I still wouldn't want the regional news to look exactly the same as the national, as that would make some people think London was bringing us our regional news, and that would be regarded as an insult by some.

Even so, poeple with Sky or Freesat can actually tune to whatever regional news they want to, and that is now available in upwards of 10 million homes across the country. Even then, BBC iPlayer features all the regional news magazines as well. So the opportunities for people to see multiple regional news programmes has never been greater. Most may never avail themselves of the opportunity, but even so, would you really want Norwich to look the same as Nottingham? Or Plymouth to look the same as Manchester? No, they're very different places, in their own way, and the areas they are part of are all very different, and that difference should be reflected. It should feel like it belongs to the area it is serving, not be indistinct from the national look or other regions, even if 99% would never notice.

Hold your horses!!!!!!!!!!!!!1


Every few years the BBC introduces a standardised look for the regions. Then one by one it's picked apart and changed slightly differently in every region. Either allow the regions to have their own unique identity, or enforce a uniform identity that doesn't fall out of consistency after one years use.

That was my point.

Re: your point on Granada and London. I was talking about graphics and titles, not the sets, which are mostly different in each BBC region anyway.

I think we're agreeing. My point is that the regional news operations across the UK don't need to be identical to each other - as most people won't be comparing them, and even if they do, so what.

However there are significant benefits to keeping within a reasonably consistent house style that fits into the wider BBC News or ITV News brands, particularly as budgets in regional television are tight, and the benefits of some common design can reduce costs (some regions have very limited in-house graphic and set design resources these days).

Except that's not what has been happening.

Pre-1999, when a regional news magazine programme made changes, there were changes to set, titles and graphics, all at the same time. Since 1999, that has rarely happened. Even with this new Channel Islands look, the changes have come to titles and set only, not graphics. Spotlight has seen many changes since adopting the BBC corporate look, but set has usually changed at a different time to titles and graphics, rather than at the same time.

With this one the titles have changed to something that is still within the BBC titles style, although the colour palette of the video elements has not been diluted as it has with other title sequences. The set shows a newsroom, as does most other BBC News sets these days, although this one is virtual rather the real newsroom we see on the national news. How is this falling out of consistency? It isn't falling out of consistency. It still looks like a BBC News studio, actually more so than the old one.

It's not a direct copy, but it is maintaining a consistent house style that is unquestionably BBC

The problem is that right now, virtual studio technology can do so much to help that. Look at Global News in Canada. Every Global News programme, from Global National to the local news programmes are run in virtual studios, that have been designed in a house style, yet still manage to include local elements to make the individual local studio identifiable as being local.

Virtual studios could even differentiate between breakfast, midday, evening and nighttime news programmes, something physical sets can still struggle to do without using multiple sets.

I think it's fair to say there are better implementations of corporate style with local elements worldwide, than the BBC implementation, which is still 100% better than ITV's effort.

Again, missing my point, I'm not talking about the set. Not necessarily even graphics, but mostly titles. That is what I was referring to in my first post, although I admit I could have made that clearer.

Look at the titles for each BBC regional news in 2008. Now look at them in 2013. Inconsistent. They were all once following the same template, now some are completely different. We now have globes on the titles of regional news programmes, which means they look even less separate from the national news. Either allow each region to have their own unique titles, or enforce a consistent, uniform look.

This is something that ITV does expertly well, although the recent name changes were a bit bizarre, but the titles and music is consistent in each region.

Don't know if this has been posted before, but here is a video of BBC CI Graphics

But you're missing the real point. Titles is only part of a look, not the entireity of it. There's far more to a look than merely the titles. You want to say there are inconsistent looks, you need to look at the whole deal. Sets, Graphics and Titles, you can't just focus on titles alone.

I don't think the difference between BBC Wales Today's titles and the titles of BBC Spotlight, is really inconsistent, and it does highlight the difference in that Wales is a nation, the South West is not, so the Wales Today titles are almost a national news title. The same can be said for Reporting Scotland, and Newsline, They are granted a status of almost national bulletins for their individual nations, as opposed to any of the English regions. It doesn't make those three inconsistent, as they still follow the BBC style.