Live BBC Weather forecast, on 05-12-2017 at 11.57am, interrupted to show Prime Minister Teresa May with the Spanish Prime Minister on the steps of 10 Downing Street.
WTF. Am I missing something? I fail to see how this occurrence was deemed important or significant enough to cut away from a live weather forecast. If a member of the royal family or somebody very significant had suddenly died then maybe, but this?
On the other hand..
(to steer this away from a Daily Mail-esque BBC bashing excerise)
Did Sky News take the 11.57 weather - or did they drop it enterly?
It was a live event, and given the 'heat' over the Northern/Southern Irish border post March 2019 at the moment, TM the PM could have said something on the steps of number 10 - so I can see the risk in junking that weather forecast.
And anyway, there was another weather forecast along 30 minutes later - and if you really wanted to know if 'Killer Artic winds and 30ft of Snow on the way' (C) Daily Express - then press red for BBC Weather Text , or go on line.
Rather pointless I think, no need to have shown that live. If anything they could have dropped the trails and countdown to the TOTP if they really wanted to report it.
And if she had said something, even an unplanned comment that turned out to be significant I can imagine the thread:
“Why didn’t they cut away from the weather forecast to show it live? They have weather forecasts all the time, you can easily get the weather online. They could have gone back to the weather. This is what a news channel is for.” And so on.
This is the sort of thread that has filled up Digital Spy and made it hardly worth reading. I hope TV Forum won’t start going the same way. Anyway, there’s a whole thread for the News Channel in The Newsroom.
Quite an unusual thing there, can’t think of the last time the weather was interrupted like that. Regardless of the slightly dubious reasoning, it was very smoothly done between Simon and Ben though (compared to say just randomly fading him out).
And if she had said something, even an unplanned comment that turned out to be significant I can imagine the thread:
“Why didn’t they cut away from the weather forecast to show it live? They have weather forecasts all the time, you can easily get the weather online. They could have gone back to the weather. This is what a news channel is for.” And so on.
This exactly.
It's just a judgment call by a news editor. They don't know what's going to happen so have to take a risk either way. Sometimes it'll pay off sometimes it won't.
Could be worse, I've known of occasions when a news channel has ducked out of a programme for something that didn't materialise or ended a few seconds later
But then, who really cares? It's a news channel, it's ephemeral and there'll be another weather forecast along in 27 minutes