New Meridian, BBC South & South East Thread

It appears there are only two left in Kent, Gravesend and Broadstairs. Gravesend is the closest to the Maidstone newsroom despite being in a neighbouring region. There is also a third across the Estuary at Lakeside Shopping Centre.

Was it a Meridian or London reporter?
Sometimes a reporter will file a report that is shown in two regions, or appear live on both.
Gravesend isn't officially in the Meridian region, but they could get away with it, as they cover most of Kent and viewers probably wouldn't know. It's not that far from places that are officially in the region.

Cool. So they saw it as a 'wider Kent interest' story.

Meridian reporter.

Incidentally just before the last lockdown, ITV London sent a reporter to Grays which is on the north side of the Thames to Gravesend when Thurrock stayed in a lower tier compared to the rest of Essex. Meridian have been known to go across to the Essex side to report.

Canturbury had a massive one (Literally half the city) but the whole thing closed

BBC South last week suddenly decided to report about Slough, it happens once or twice a year. This time it was because Slough is the only area in the region in Tier 3

I really despise this sort of thing. Region-stretching to get a piece of a story that isn't in their de facto patch.

It's like how BBC South & ITV Meridian arguably have the stronger claim to east/southeast parts of Wiltshire, but BBC West & ITV West Country only suddenly decide to talk about that area when it suits them despite not doing so 95% of the time.

Basically, once a year to talk about the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge. The current controversial proposed road tunnel near Stonehenge has also been featuring in both Bristol-based news programmes recently. And obviously when the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury happened, they were all over that (immediately prior to that, I'm sure that the Bristol news programmes hadn't mentioned the Salisbury-ish area for about 94 weeks or something).

The most bizarre thing was during 2012, both South Today and Points West each did an OB from Salisbury using two separate SNG vans a few hundred yards apart as part of the Olympic Torch procession

Yeah there was no need to report from Slough on South. It was just to add some drama, as the region is otherwise all Tier 1 and 2.
It was the BBC London politics editor. He recorded a report for South, shown 'as live', while appearing live on London at the same time.
No doubt there will be more of this sort of thing. It is cheap to do, and 99% of viewers wouldn't even know or notice that the town isn't officially in the region.

As we know, ITV regional news already makes generic reports, which are shown in several regions, often without mentioning particular places.

There's a few Hannington aerials in the town, but neither BBC South nor Meridian routinely cover the place.

The only period Meridian did, was in the days of the Newbury studio and the 'Hannington Only' sub region, probably because they were scratching around for news !

It's not as if BBC South don't already have a large enough official region, without looking for tenuous links to adjacent areas !

Gravesend to be fair is a conflicting part of Kent. The relay in the town has London content, yet BBC South East claim it as theirs (and was a relay of Bluebell Hill until 2012 for BBC1/2) and Sky/Freesat postcodes in Gravesend and Dartford have LCN 101 as BBC One SE with ITV London on 103.

Crawley also has editorial issues. BBC SE claim it as theirs, most aerials point to Reigate and Crystal Palace with has BBC/ITV London, Meridian cover Crawley Town FC matches, ITV London don't. You can't switch Reigate to BBC SE/ITV Meridian as it's a SFN with Crystal Palace. A nightmare for the M23 corridor which BBC SE covers editorially, yet the majority of viewers with DTT are stuck with the 'wrong' news that has a Londoncentric skew.

Amen to that final paragraph.

The Oxford sub-opt edition of ST routinely uses reports filed by Points West and Look East, to cover news from e.g. Swindon and Milton Keynes respectively.

They aren't averse to region-stretching, using reports from BBC London and even sometimes Midlands Today. I remember Tring being mentioned on one occasion, years ago.