The very few occasions of late that I’ve seen studio c it’s starting to look very run down. Especially the cat walk.
It’s held up pretty well considering it’s on air 23 hours a day and is 9 years old now. I agree though, it’s not looking it’s best.
The problem is is that, when the time does come to replace the NBH sets, it'll be a nightmare. It's not like it was 20 years ago when the set could be ripped out and a new one put up over a weekend, these days new sets take an age to install - with an increasing amount of tech needing to be calibrated and weeks of rehearsal being the norm.
Plus you have the decamping issue - entire channels will have to move to temporary homes for months at a time - and the simultaneous issue - do you do
Studio C and E at the same time or not. It would be possible to do both simultaneously - one could move into B and the other into D, with London relegated to A. But which gets which - World is more familiar with B, but I'm sure that nationals would rather have the larger studio and catwalk. You could of course install new sets one at a time, but with unprecedented levels of simulcasting between NC and World - you'll have months of one studio being completely different to the other (while they have done this before, it is suboptimal from a branding/relaunch point of view).
Then you've got the Furios - do you:
- Keep them as is - in which case your set design options are limited to being very similar in layout to the existing sets.
- Introduce a new track layout - additional time to install and calibrate the cameras.
- Replace with new tech - gives you the most options for new set design, put also the most expensive.