South West England & CI Thread

Well of course Newsline, Wales Today, and Reporting Scotland will have national style titles because they are the nationals.

Do you not agree that either the BBC should allow each region to have their own unique look or enforce their uniform looks and not let it slip out of consistency? The latter means we have ended up with messes like this:

http://www.tv-live.org.uk/wp/media/bbcnews2008/regions/northwest/nwt0838.jpg

From TV Live.

Does it really matter? Only to geeks, your average viewer doesn't give a monkeys. As I see it, it has branding still, it still screams BBC News at me. I think that is the point, not that it must match exactly per region.

It's not inconsistent. It still says BBC News even without the graphic to tell us that, and it features local sites around the area.

It's not inconsistent, it's not a mess. It still fits the range of styles that have become the BBC News Style, and actually, it's quite a good look.

You can have individual looks, within a corporate blueprint, that's what we're getting now from the BBC.

Completely agree on principle but I'm not convinced it works in practice. Unfortunately due to budgets, obviously regions can't spend all kinds of money developing their own look which kind of fits in with the BBC News brand. We end up with these coloured titles which I think look hideous, or the big mash up we had around 2006/7 with everyone kind of adopting the old LDN look. Some regions are obviously better than others (take North West Tonight back in 2007) but I can certainly see the argument of just sending out good-looking but generic titles to all regions.

That picture above is what you would see if we have totally generic titles, and every region has these globes. Spotlight use there's as a background graphic on the big screen in the studio, which is also used to present weather.

Where is that globe from? It isn't part of any regions sequence, or the nationals. It is used on iPlayer for the Weekend News and the Regions, it isn't part of World News Today or America AFAIK.

I should have removed that picture for my post because it wasn't relevant. If anything that picture demonstrates my point. That image was (from what I can remember - correct me if I am wrong) intended for plasmas/projector screens in the regions only. In fact, the regions in 2008 were never supplied with an endboard for closings, so the above mess and other regional closings which were equally messy were BECAUSE of a lack of generic titles.

I have to say that the picture quality when watching Tuesday's BBC CI News Evening bulletin via Satellite really is horrifically bad.

Why does the set has to be very small and it's graphics to be like analogue standard from the 70's or 80's? It looks terrible. It beggars belief that ITV's Channel TV news bulletin has a much stronger & better picture quality than it's competitor.

I will dread to see what it will look like in HD from next year as I could even be more disappointed.

Why does it "beggar belief"? Channel TV is a much more established operation than BBC Channel Islands, and is still in the building where it ran a whole ITV region. Channel do a full programme whereas BBC Channel Islands is very much an outpost of Spotlight doing only part of the programme, so is staffed and equipped accordingly.

I know, Regional News is something that ITV are often ahead of the BBC. From what I have seen in various regions there are very few BBC Regions which are better than their ITV counterparts. Where I live, however, BBC South Today definitely out performs Meridian Tonight.

I think North West Tonight out performs Granada Reports but I could be wrong. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was the other way round in the past.

I think it's produced specially for the regions to use. Spotlight use an animated version for their breakfast bulletins, as shown below.
http://www.tv-live.org.uk/wp/media/bbcnews2008/regions/spotlight/graphics1.jpg

It's been part of the design since 2008, and I think it's a further re-enforcement of the globe being the BBC News symbol.