At long last, a new pan-regional current affairs format will launch in late January.
We are England will launch on Wednesday 26th January at 7.30 with six pan-regional editions of the programme from hubs in Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham, Bristol, London and Norwich running for 10x30 per series with another in the Autumn.
I'll make a guess on the hub regions.
Leeds: BBC Yorkshire, BBC Yorks & Lincs, BBC North West.
Newcastle: BBC North East & Cumbria
Birmingham: BBC Midlands, BBC East Midlands
Bristol: BBC West, BBC South West, BBC Channel Islands
London: BBC London, BBC South East, BBC South
Norwich: BBC East, BBC East (West/Cambridge).
If that's the case, NE&C and the East maintain their own editions, while the rest of England shares with at least 2 regions.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2022/n...e-launches
Given that there was a fair bit of duplicated content across the various supposedly region-specific Inside Outs anyway, I don't think that the pan-regionalness of the new programme will really be that much different.
In terms of the end-product seen by viewers, that is. I appreciate all the redundancies etc that have occurred off-screen, which the average viewer doesn't necessarily realise.
If the new programme is still comprised of 3 x 10-minute (approx) items per episode, then the pan-regional ones may well try to have one from each region covered (e.g. a typical Leeds edition may have stories from e.g. Liverpool, Harrogate, and Grimsby).
EDIT: Or maybe the whole programme will be a bit like the "aggregate" reports that are shared across many ITV plc regional news programmes, covering quite general topics (e.g. housing market, hospitals, education etc) with a modicum of (pan-)regional "set dressing" by throwing-in a few statistics and examples (e.g. name-checking specific schools/hospitals etc) pertaining to the particular broadcast area covered.
We Are England sounds more like a football doc not a regional news programme
XIII post_id=62200 time= user_id=894 Wrote:We Are England sounds more like a football doc not a regional news programme
Glad I'm not the only one who thought that.
Not a brilliant choice of title.
But this *is* the same Beeb that replaced "On The Record" with "The Politics Show", called a programme literally just "Victoria Derbyshire" (not even flanked with e.g. "The..." and "...Show" or similar), and now has programmes called both "Sunday Morning" and "Sunday Morning Live".
So, clearly "W1A-ness" has well and truly taken over all programme-naming policy at the Beeb.
Some regions get shafted more than others here - doing ok are the north east, east, midlands and south west
But Yorkshire, Yorks and Lincs and North West being lumped together is pretty poor, as is London, South East and South.
And I agree “We are England” sounds like a football show, though I suppose it’s better than “The…. show”
Andrew post_id=62233 time= user_id=791 Wrote:Some regions get shafted more than others here - doing ok are the north east, east, midlands and south west
But Yorkshire, Yorks and Lincs and North West being lumped together is pretty poor, as is London, South East and South.
And I agree “We are England” sounds like a football show, though I suppose it’s better than “The…. show”
Or a drama starring Vicky McClure and Stephen Graham
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_England
XIII post_id=62200 time= user_id=894 Wrote:We Are England sounds more like a football doc not a regional news programme
There was a BBC Three documentary called We are England last year which looked at two rappers who created a rap anthem for the Euros.
Andrew post_id=62233 time= user_id=791 Wrote:Some regions get shafted more than others here
*snip*
Yorkshire, Yorks and Lincs and North West being lumped together is pretty poor, as is London, South East and South.
Indeed. Viewers from Barrow-in-Furness to King's Lynn, or from Epping to Weymouth, getting the same "local" edition is pretty laughable.
I wouldn't get too worked up about what the actual editorial areas are yet until we see proof later this month, but the ones I mentioned are an educated guess.
It would have been easier to guess the editorial areas if they went for the weather hub regions, but as Newcastle and Norwich are going to be hubs, it seems the regions I've speculated are the most realistic editorially.
Maybe the launch of this show over larger regional areas is the reason BBC One doesn't have regional idents in the new look presentation. Just an idea.
"We Are England" sounds like the title of a film about football hooliganism!
For my part, I don’t mind the name. It’s a little bit of a homage to some of the more inventive regional titles ‘spotlight’ etc whilst keeping a geographical focus in the title.
I also see this as a natural rationalisation of some of the journalistic content to avoid the hyper local duplication of story gathering. Inside Out always struck me as a bit of a medical procedure but had potential to be much broader so this seems like a good vehicle to really drive home some high quality local work whilst not just falling back into the ‘cats care home needs funds for the roof’ type stories.
Confirmation of the pan-regional editions of We are England are exactly as I predicted. NE & Cumbria and East get their own editions.
The format appears to go back to the old style regional docs before Inside Out where it's a long form doc per episode.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013wc...s/upcoming
Maybe this show is the reason the new idents don't have regional identifiers on them, to avoid needing special versions for these macro regions?
The name doesn't really work for a regional programme, "We are the North" or something might fit better
Agreed, to me the title suggests they’ll be occasional England wide editions.
But the title fails on two counts, I can’t imagine someone asking ‘did you watch that We Are England thing, last night?’ In casual conversation and it suggests it’s it’s an England wide programme so it loses a unique selling point from the off. Although I suppose neither of those things matter, as it sounds like it’s regional programming box ticking exercise.