The new NEW Central West and BBC Midlands thread

My understanding was that those plans were ditched quite early on in the planning process. It did explain why BBC London escaped the curse of the God-awful Thomson 1707 cameras, and instead got LDK100s (or were they 200s by then?) as they were the cameras in use by the MHS training studio (and it didn't make sense to have two different models on the same site)

The same cameras were also in use in N6, N8 and N9 and at Elstree for EastEnders (though News switched to Sony BVPE30s when the Barcos arrived, as the Barco colour wheels and LDK mechanical shutters didn't interact well - though Al Jazeera solved that problem)

Yes, the idea was flawed as they couldn't get in there until 5 and it meant having to run two studios as the shorter bulletins came from the newsroom. I don't think any technical infrastructure was laid into it.

BBC London's studio floor was shared with some office desks for a while, when the second set was installled they were moved elsewhere.



Off topic, but the LDKs were Philips and now are Thomson/GrassVallley?

Midlands Today turns 50:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/posts/Midlands-Today-turns-50

Apparently a report on last night's Central News was blocked out on +1 with the Legal Reasons slide.

Just a heads up for tonights main edition of MT at 6.30 - special edition for the 50 year milestone.

And may I say how cheap the '50 Years' titles looked. Fair play to them for marking the milestone, but surely something a little less tacky could have been conceived.
I don't have video capture unfortunately, but it was basically a flat montage of title cards from over the years shown through a 'window' which turned out to be a large '50th' number that zoomed out.

And if you look at the bottom right Midlands Today logo in the opening sequence, it has a triangle play button in the centre of the logo!

Straight off the internet, and into the opening titles.

Shabby.Very poor.

Carrying on from the 50th anniversary and they've posted a clip up of a moment I had completely forgotten but remember well from Red Nose Day 2005.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-29254139

Very funny!

Two presenters, a laughing moment, that lovely newsroom view, such good days of the programme.

Those awful itv news branded laptops made a reappearance tonight - why oh why!

No Sameena Ali-Khan this week so Lucy in the hot seat - first with Steve Clamp then Bob tonight. Lots of banter galore! Plus Wesley Smith reporting for Central this week and also being utilised for the late bulletin. No surprise really with who the head of news is.

Central now have giant ITV logos on the back of the laptops now from today.

What's with their constant obsession with sticking all sorts of logos on the laptops?