BONG! After a month, the headline viewing figures are in for the battle of the News at 10s – and the winner is … the BBC.
And we’re not just talking a small, on points, victory – quite often, the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News is pulling in twice as many viewers at the recently reincarnated ITV News At Ten.
If ITV are surprised by this rather poor show then they shouldn’t have been. After all, News at Ten is a rather poor show compared with a) the BBC’s offering and b) how good News at 10.30 used to be.
The problem is quite simple: Retro might work when it comes to giving cartoon a new lease of life, or when dreaming up dramas (Ashes to Ashes, for example).
But when it comes to news, being cutting edge and first is all that matters. Why did Channel 5’s news bulletins pull a real punch when the channel first launched? It wasn’t for the gravitas of the news coverage, it was because Kirsty Young stood, and walked, as she read the news.
Everyone else followed suit, and sitting behind a desk now looks rather dull. Which is exactly where News at Ten sits. In the rather dull category.
It boasted that it was just going to have people sat behind desks. One of those people is Sir Trevor McDonald, dusted down from the Tonight series and asked to anchor the news bulletin he left several years ago. Smart choice? No. Sir Trev may be a national treasure, but the pacey style of delivery all news programmes have to pitch at now just isn’t him. Authority can be delivered with style and flair. But not if you are Sir Trev.
Even the title sequence, where the viewer appears to be flying inside a faulty plane lurching over London landmarks, looks dated. Perhaps it was supposed too, but against the BBC’s slick graphics, it looks all too, well, 1980s.
Then there is the news itself. Good as it goes, but all too often it feels as if they are more interested in saying "look, we’re the first TV team to broadcast live from inside the Antartic" rather than actually deliver new news stories.
To take on the BBC, Sir Trev needs to be sent back to ‘special projects,’ Mark Austin paired up alongside Julie Etchingham and script writers told to return to the very strong style of writing from a human perspective. Sir Trev never seems comfortable delivering that. But it’s what they do so much better than the BBC.
Until those changes are made, it’ll be a case of simply guessing when, not if, the faultering aircraft that is News at Ten finally falls out of the sky.
- Post to:
del.icio.us
Digg
Newsvine
Nowpublic
Reddit
« Previous | Home | Next »