This blog has now closed. Please visit my new blog, Stepreo.

Archive: News

Welcome home to ITV

13 May 2011 14:30

Categories: Television presentation gem of the week

The 1979 ITV strike was the longest in the history of British television. It was also the last major strike. When service resumed after ten weeks, this is what viewers saw.

With this naff jingle, viewers must have immediately wished that ITV never came back.

Following the ten week break, it would be a further ten weeks until new original programming was ready to air again as all of the regional stations had stopped making programmes during the strike. It must have been a long struggle for ITV to win back viewers from the BBC after this five month period.

In the first few days following the end of the strike, the station had to make do with generic ITV presentation, hence the generic ITV clock. This generic approach had only been used once before, during the 1968 strike, although it is pretty much the norm today.

Brilliant ITN theme music.

Comments closed

BBC News (1988)

25 March 2011 14:04

Categories: Television presentation gem of the week

Is this the greatest news title sequence of all time? It was controversial at the time, but I love it.

The strikingly bold transmitter logo was designed by Martin Lambie-Nairn, who is arguably the most important person in television idents history. He is the person behind some of the most popular idents of all time, including the original Channel 4 blocks and the ’2′ figures for BBC Two.

But this BBC News logo appeared to be a misfire. It was unpopular with viewers, some of whom even likened the logo to Nazi imagery.

But I think the logo looks fantastic and ahead of its time. The music is brilliant too.

This title sequence was introduced in 1988, although the clip is from 1991.

1 comment

The end of local television?

1 October 2008 01:09

Categories: Current affairs, Economics, Edinburgh, Fife, Internet, Media, Newspapers, Politics, Scotland, Technology, Television

Last week Ofcom gave ITV the go-ahead to cut regional output by 50%. Today ITV have duly gone and cut 1,000 jobs, almost half of which will come from regional news. ITV plc looks set to reduce the number of its regional news areas from 17 to nine.

It does make you wonder about the future of regional television, if it even exists. I have personally never been a fan of regional television, and I say that even having lived all my life in a very distinctive part of the UK. I might be the wrong person to ask though. I’m no fan of the “idiot box”. Next year, when F1 finally goes back to the BBC where it belongs, I will probably be able to say that I do not watch commercial television at all.

But regional television, it is fair to say, is not exactly pain-free viewing. More often that not, you can tell the programmes were made on a minuscule budget, and they are generally pretty naff.

Of course, back in the day, most ITV programmes were “regional” in the sense that they were made by one of the ITV franchisees. But the best programmes went out on the network and were therefore aimed at a national audience, with UK-sized aspirations and UK-sized budgets. As such, programmes that were aimed to serve a particular area were, almost by definition, sub-standard. I do wonder quite what the point of such programmes is.

It is slightly different for regional news. I can understand the appeal of having a separate bulletin dedicated to the news in a particular area. But the thing is that the regions are always too big for the bulletins to have a truly ‘local’ feel.

The ITV region I live in, STV Central, stretches from approximately where I live to Fort William while encompassing the massive populations of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde. Watching the bulletin, you would get the impression that hardly anything ever happens outside of Glasgow apart from the politics stuff which happens in Edinburgh. Even many of the political programmes, both on STV and BBC Scotland, are made in Glasgow rather than Edinburgh. If you live anywhere else, it can feel pretty alienating.

The BBC has never even attempted to split Scotland up into regions and Reporting Scotland essentially aspires to be a national news bulletin. The problem with even this is that there either isn’t enough news to report or there isn’t enough budget. Even Scotland, with its large area and separate institutions — most importantly, the Parliament — apparently doesn’t have enough going on to properly justify taking up 30 minutes of the schedule.

Whenever I watch Reporting Scotland, they seem to spend about five minutes per programme trailing what’s coming up later in the programme. Around five minutes into the programme, they are already talking about sport. And then they are normally only talking about football. Jimmy McPhee is in the airport today ready to depart for his meaningless match. Big whoop!

Another problem with regional news — especially on ITV — is the fact that the regions do not seem to be very logical. I’ve already talked about the huge area covered by STV Central. At some arbitrary point in Glenrothes, probably depending on how far behind the hill you are, you stop receiving STV Central and start receiving STV North / the old Grampian. Why is that then? Is Glenrothes more relevant to Aberdeen than to Glasgow? That’s not clear to me. Bearing in mind the fact that much of the population of Glenrothes is or was Glasgow overspill, it doesn’t seem quite right.

Of course, that is nothing compared to the abominable “Border” region which straddles England and Scotland and takes in the Isle of Man for good measure. That is an anachronism if ever there was one. You can tell the ITV regions were originally drawn up about sixty years ago because that would never wash today. I am no nationalist, though I am a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, and one has to wonder if it was a deliberate choice to have one ITV region that took in these three political entities — a 1960s equivalent of saying “North Britain”.

It is probably wrong for me speak for residents of the ITV Border region when I don’t live there, and I can well believe that there are many people who, having grown up with Lookaround, feel very attached to it. But for me, if I lived in the south of Scotland, with legislation affecting my life being made in Edinburgh, I think I would prefer to get my news from a Scottish city rather than Carlisle.

Of course, as Cllr Fraser Macpherson points out, that situation will be even worse under ITV’s new proposals. If ITV get their way, the Border and Tyne Tees regions will be merged. So Scots living in the Borders will not be getting their news from Carlisle — they’ll be getting their news from Gateshead.

The problems of the ITV Border region are recognised, with the existence of a ‘Border Scotland’ opt-out. From what I gather, this incorporates a news segment dedicated to Scotland and editions of Scotsport. What a faff that is though. Would it not just be more sensible to go the whole hog and recognise Scotland as a distinct entity? Every so often SMG express an interest in buying the Scottish bit of the ITV Border franchise. I kind of think they ought to get on with it, particularly if it’s only going to merge with Tyne Tees otherwise.

There are two big reasons why the situation is such a mess. One is geography. I am sure there are bureaucrats somewhere or other whose dream is for the ITV regions to be transformed so that they match the government office regions of the UK. At least that would be neater, and at least that way Scotland would have its own ITV region.

The problem is, those pesky hills get in the way. There is a clever map of the ITV regions on Wikipedia, and as you can see you can’t actually draw many meaningful borders between regions. The map looks like a mess.

The big reason, though, is of course money. Maybe back in the 1960s and 1970s owning an ITV franchise was a license to print money. Today, ITV leaks money like a sieve. Richard Havers traces the change back to the introduction of satellite television. This sucked advertising revenue away from ITV and spread it thinly across hundreds of smaller channels.

Since then, the ITV companies have merged and merged and merged until they became CarltonAndGranada before becoming the ITV plc we all love to hate. Scotland was not immune either as Scottish Television swallowed up Grampian to become SMG (now STV Group) and subsequently almost merged with UTV.

It now no longer makes financial sense for ITV companies to pour money into making news programmes. Economies of scale dictate that the regions will become fewer and bigger until they cease to be regional at all (and as I argue above, perhaps that has already happened).

I think it is time to give up on the idea of regional news programmes, at least on ITV (though Scotland can probably sustain it thanks to its status as a nation, relatively large population and separate political system). But if regional news must stay on television, perhaps it would be better to think of it as a public service that the BBC alone should carry out. I know that ITV is a PSB too, but they are considering giving that up because they think it costs them too much now. The writing is on the wall.

Besides, if I want to know the local news, where do I go? I certainly don’t watch Scotland Today if I want to find out what’s going on locally. I would buy The Fife Free Press or just visit a local news website. These options are probably far more cost-effective way to get local news.

Apart from that, dare I say that local news might be one arena where people turn more and more towards citizen journalists?

10 comments

This is the news Jim, but not as we know (or want) it

25 January 2008 01:24

Categories: Current affairs, Media, Television

So “Sir Trevor McDonald” (it is illegal to say ‘Trevor McDonald’ without putting ‘Sir’ in front of it) has just completed his second gruelling week back at the helm of the resurrected News at Ten. It doesn’t seem to have worked for ITV.

They’ve made a big fuss about how they are bringing back an institution, even though they killed if off in the first place so that it wouldn’t get in the way of the football or something. And they are making a big deal about how Trevor McDonald is back presenting it while keeping quiet about the fact that they spent years shunting him around various scheduling back-alleys in the ignominious “News at When?” days.

I don’t even get all of the fuss about Trevor McDonald. Everyone goes on about how he’s the country’s favourite newsreader. I don’t get it. His delivery is wooden and robotic. His is like one of those voices that blind people have to put up with on their screen readers on their computers. And have you ever seen him smile? I haven’t.

So if it seemed like his heart wasn’t in it originally, imagine what it must be like now! He thought he had finished with all of these late nights. Now he is being paid £1,633 per minute to deliver the news in his odd staccato drawl.

And that brings up the next thing that’s wrong with News at Ten. It is so painfully obvious that he refused to come on board if he had to do all the heavy lifting. So the bulletin is shared with Julie Etchingham. Presumably they couldn’t use Mark Austin (how pissed off must he be about all this?) because having two male presenters would be, like, so gaaay or something. As if doing it (the bulletin, I mean) with someone young enough to be your daughter is any less perverse.

But since when was the “heavyweight” late-night bulletin double-headed? This must be the first time it’s happened. I thought the point of having two people presenting the news was so that you could have all of that cringeworthy banter during the light moments, which is why until recently they had two people presenting the Six O’Clock Tabloid News, which is all light moments apart from the faux Daily Mail-style scaremongering bits at the start.

But News at Ten is not meant to have banter, except for the ‘and finally’ bit, but there is only one ‘and finally’ story so there’s not much space for banter there. No, Julie Etchingham is just there so that poor Trevor McDonald can save his breath. He now only speaks for around three minutes per programme apparently.

Then there is this monstrosity.

“This is the news!”

All I can say is, it must have been fun to be that timpani player.

ITV seem to think that reviving News at Ten would give them credibility, gravitas and prestige. But it has actually highlighted many of its major weaknesses. It’s just quick fix after sticking plaster.

Throw money at a problem. Bring in a big name star. Remix the theme tune to the point that it becomes self-parodying. Use overly-flashy computer graphics which make it look more like the deck of the USS Enterprise than a newsroom.

The fact is that ITV News is still rotten. It is focussed too much on gimmicks and sensationalism. It doesn’t matter how much of an ‘institution’ the title of the programme and its main anchor are. If the programme is rubbish, people will not watch it.

That is why by the third day of the new run of News at Ten it had lost a third of its viewers and remained over 2 million behind the BBC Ten O’Clock News. Which has no gimmicks at all.

6 comments

Why Alan Johnston is newsworthy

5 July 2007 21:47

Categories: Biased BBC, Current affairs, Entertainment, Newspapers, Radio, Television

This is unusual for me (in recent months at least). I am going to defend the MSM and journalism.

Bishop Hill is a blogger who often criticises the BBC. So it should not be a surprise when he takes any opportunity to have a pop at them. But his complaints about the BBC’s coverage of the Alan Johnson [sic] kidnapping are wide of the mark.

When you think about it, isn’t it just wrong that Alan Johnson got a slot on the BBC news and on the front of the website, pretty much every day for the last four months, while the other hostages were all but forgotten? It rather nicely encapsulates the problem with the BBC, or even the public sector as a whole.

It’s run for the benefit of its staff, rather than for the public who pay for it.

First of all, it is hardly as if the BBC was the only media organisation that was covering the kidnapping of Alan Johnston, the BBC’s Gaza correspondent (as opposed to Alan Johnson, the Labour MP). In fact, quite a diverse range of news outlets covered it.

When I heard the news on the radio when it broke at around 2 o’clock yesterday morning, I switched on the television to find that Sky News was covering it just as much as the BBC was. The Telegraph had buttons prominently displayed on its blogs. I doubt there was any major newspaper or broadcaster that didn’t cover the story.

Terry Lloyd, who was an ITN — not BBC — journalist, was also given similar coverage upon his death.

The comparison to the five British hostages being currently held in Iraq also does not make sense. Of course, on a purely personal level, the kidnapping of any individual is every bit as despicable as the kidnapping of a journalist. The trauma and anguish that the individuals and their families must go through will be exactly the same. But beyond that, it has no real effect on the wider world.

The kidnapping of a journalist — particularly one like Alan Johnston — has a real effect on the rest of the world. The job of a journalist (even if it is employed by an organisation that you don’t particularly like) is to tell people what is happening in the world.

Alan Johnston was the only Western journalist who was based in Gaza. The only one. In a sense, he was the world’s only pair of eyes and ears in Gaza.

The kidnapping of Alan Johnston was not just an assault on an individual’s freedom. It was the attempted blindfolding of the world.