London Live

LL today was a classic example of not having enough resources at lunchtime. Two big London stories, the death of three teenage boys in Hayes and the Hammersmith burst water main. They sent their one and only reporter on an OB to Hammersmith.

Don't think that is a resources issue, but a priorities issue.

A burst water main is a burst water main, what reporting can you do other than announce it every once in a while and put what streets are closed on screen.

The reporter should have covered the Hayes story.

There's a chicken and egg effect here. Is it that London Live isn't providing local news Londoners want, or is it just that Londoners aren't that bothered about local news anyway?

I'm relatively new to the London scene, so I'm happy to be shouted down on this, but it seems to me they're not. London is a special case. A lot of the 'local' stories are on the national news anyway, and it has a huge amount of councils, local government and a bloody great river separating chunks of it. So therefore people in north London don't really care about south London and vice versa, and in fact people only really care what's going on right beside them.

It's impossible to cover the whole capital to that level of detail without doing large packages on stories huge chunks of the city don't care about, so what you end up with on BBC and ITV local news is stuff that works everywhere: crime news, transport news, and film premieres at Leicester Square.

Don't get me wrong, London Live is not a good channel, but the entire concept of a local TV station for London with news at the forefront was fundamentally flawed before they got anywhere near it.

Didn't it take the BBC decades to offer a regional news service (on TV) in London - think it was the 80s, and even then it wasn't until the turn of the century London got a dedicated region of it's own. It was only the early 90s too when ITV provided a 7-day a week news service for London - LWT News did the bare minimum and certainly LWT and arguably also Thames were more concerned about supplying the network than regional content.

London Plus was the first attempt back in 1984, followed in 1989 by Newsroom South East from Elstree. Both programmes covered the Home Counties of Kent/East Sussex and Oxfordshire/Berkshire as well as London itself. It was only in 2001 that London got its own dedicated news programme.

Going back to PCUK's post - I don't think it's because Londoner's don't want to watch local news - as far as I know both the BBC and ITV's local offerings get reasonable viewers. It's much more that London Live hasn't managed to produce anything worth watching.

I'm not proposing a 24 hour news channel for London, but something along the lines of the original STV Glasgow model would I believe work well.

According to Greg Dyke, Newsroom Southeast was also known as 'F*ck Off Kent'

I'm not sure what their ratings are like, but I imagine not as good in terms of share as the rest of the UK. The region includes about a fifth of the population, but I bet the two programmes struggle to get a million most nights.


PCUK is right in that it is difficult to cover the region its so big, diverse and fragmented. However the other big issue they've always had is that many peoples commutes get them home too late for regional news. That's the reason Thames moved their regional news to 6:30 in the late 80s.

The argument that 'London news is national' news is nonsense though. Lots of national stories happen in London, but that doesn't make them a London story. A good London news story is one that isn't relevant outside and with so many people and institutions in Greater London there shouldn't be any problem filling news bulletins

Yep - BBC London was formed when BBC Oxford and BBC South East were split away from the previous Newsroom South East operation.

However BBC London covers an area far larger than London - including lots of home counties areas - not that you'd know by watching the show...

That's also true for ITV London.

There are some home counties within the London region which would probably be better served by neighbouring regions, such as parts of Essex, which could be better served by Anglia/Look East, and parts of Berkshire, which could be better served by Meridian/BBC South.

I used to live in Reading, and parts of it were in the Meridian/BBC South region, and other parts were in the London region.

Lets not forget that Henley in South Oxfordshire is in the London region, along with High Wycombe in Bucks and Forest Row in East Sussex.

My area (east Surrey) would probably get better coverage from South East Today, and indeed they have been known to cover stories in the Reigate/Redhill/Horley area, even though few people in the area will have been watching, at least not via terrestrial. BBC London predominates round here, though some aerials are pointed towards the Midhurst transmitter so they receive South Today. It's a wonder we even get a BBC local radio station, albeit one that's only local to Surrey for four hours a day, but it goes some way to making up for the absence of a television news service.

BBC London News only usually comes down here when it snows, and I suspect even then it's only because one of their reporters lives in the area...

Said reporter also covered the Southern strike from your part of Surrey as well.

London and TW seem to take turns to cover stories from Gatwick.

When it launched BBC London had correspondents covering the some parts of their patch, but they weren't very logical or consistent - IIRC there was: Essex, Hertfordshire, West London and South London. So some areas got served a lot better than others. Sussex and Kent they strayed away from because that was edging into South East's patch* and Surrey just got forgotten about

I think the same might have been the case the other side of London, with Buckinghamshire being too close to Oxford's new patch for comfort

*although they'd share stories with South East Today as they did Essex stories with Look East

BBC London has always super-served Hertfordshire, not only did/does it have it's own reporter but it was the successor to Newsroom Southeast, which was based in Hertfordshire so lots of it's newsroom staff lived there