That-cher

I do love reading stories by people who worked in the BBC Presentation department in times gone by. Especially all the hair-raising tales about breakdowns or near-misses. What always strikes me is how while some things have obviously changed over the years, many other things have stayed exactly the same. Believe me, I speak from experience.

For instance, take this page of stories, on the Tech-ops History Site. I’m not yet in a position to tell many of my stories, but versions of most of those things have certainly happened to me while I’ve been directing BBC One and Two. Why yes, I am in therapy right now, why do you ask?

But one particular story stands out. In just a few short words, it builds up a real image of a dreadful piece of transmission, on a supremely important day when BBC1 needed to get things right:

“Margaret Thatcher resigning and having to go the News off an intro from some idiot presenter on a daytime prog in Birmingham who said ‘Now for news of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation, here’s Moira Stuart…'”

In my head, I could see it clearly. News are supposed to be the ones actually breaking the story. A daytime presenter is not supposed to gazump the national newsreader and tell the viewer first. It sounds like a hideous piece of television, at least from a professional point of view.

Except there’s something odd about it. Because I realised the other day that the newsflash which first announced Thatcher’s resignation was actually sitting on YouTube, and has been for years. Broadcast on the 22nd November 1990, the video contains both the initial BBC and ITV reports, but it’s the BBC one at the start of the video that we’re interested in:

You will note that the presenter Debi Jones most certainly does not throw over to the news with the line “Now for news of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation” – it’s just a straight “go over to the newsroom” announcement. Nor, for that matter, is it Moira Stuart presenting: it’s Lynette Lithgow.

What’s going on?

The answer lies in the unusual way the BBC1 daytime schedule was formatted at this point in 1990. Instead of being a series of separate programmes throughout the morning, the whole thing was branded under the Daytime UK strand, with live programmes coming from Birmingham, Manchester and London, all linked together with what was essentially in-vision continuity, and with news bulletins on the hour. It was a fairly complicated setup, and rather different to how BBC One looks in daytime today, with its clearly discrete programmes.¹

Let’s take a look at some of the paperwork for this particular episode of Daytime UK. This opening description of the output gives a good sense of just how complicated the programme was.²

VT SEQ 1: OPENING TITLES (SEE C+D) / 00’30
JUDI OPENED THE PROGRAMME AND HANDED OVER / 00’12
ADRIAN TRAILED PEOPLE TODAY – TO FOLLOW / 00’34
JUDI HANDED OVER TO / 00’08
ROBERT KILROY-SILK WHO TRAILED TODAY’S “KILROY” / 00’22
JUDI TRAILED SCENE TODAY + VT SEQ:2 (SEE C) / 00’53
JUDI + SLIDEFILE MENU + 1/4″ TAPE (SEE D) + OOV TRAILED THE REST OF THE MORNING + LINKED TO THE NEWS / 00’55

09:00:00
NATIONAL NEWS + REGIONAL NEWS & WEATHER + NATIONAL WEATHER + VT PRESENTATION TRAIL / 05’00

Here we can see how the individual programmes such as People Today and Kilroy were linked together, along with the programme handing directly to the news.

Skipping ahead a little, we then have the following:

PEOPLE TODAY I – TO FOLLOW INCLUDING A NEWS FLASH / 29’18

This describes the clip embedded above, of the newsflash interrupting People Today. And… hang on, what do we have next?

JUDI BRIEFLY LINKED TO THE NEWS WHICH EXTENDED OVER THE REST OF THE MORNING / 00’12

10:00:00
NATIONAL NEWS WHICH KEPT UPTODATE³ WITH THE LATEST NEWS ON MRS THATCHER’S RESIGNATION

Oh, hello. Surely this is our famous link, described at the top of this article?

Sadly, there are no further details, so we can’t be sure. This tale has ended in frustration and misery. Or at least it would have done… if somebody hadn’t very kindly sent me a full copy of the episode of Daytime UK in question. So I can confirm that the newsflash in the video embedded above took place at 9:43, which is when the BBC first reported on Thatcher’s resignation. And sure enough, Judi Spiers does indeed introduce an extended news at 10am.

Reader, I would love to include the clip of that for you here to complete the story. Sadly, for various reasons, it’s probably inadvisable. I can, however, do the next best thing, and transcribe it for you. So here is that link at 10am, verbatim:

JUDI SPIERS: Hello again. Well, due to Mrs. Thatcher’s shock decision to stand down from the Tory leadership, we’re going over to the newsroom for an extended report, brought to you by Nicholas Witchell.

(Cut to newsroom)

NICHOLAS WITCHELL: Margaret Thatcher is to resign as Prime Minister. She told the cabinet a short time ago about her decision. In an official statement from Downing Street, she said that she would resign as soon as a new leader of the Conservative Party was elected.

There we have it. This is the moment described right at the beginning of this article.

And all of a sudden, what’s happened here clicks into place. For years after reading the initial anecdote, I’d had it in my head that the Daytime UK presenter introduced the breaking news report, and revealed the news to the viewer before the newsreader did. This isn’t what happened at all. The news had already broken by this point – it was first reported a full seventeen minutes earlier. What’s more, Daytime UK does actually have to explain that instead of the planned five minute bulletin, they are now going to feature extensive, unscheduled news coverage instead. Judi Spiers needs to acknowledge the reason why they’re not going to be showing what they had been promising all morning.

Now, the handover is a little awkward, in a way which comes across more when actually watching it than in the above transcription; perhaps a more generic “ongoing political events” announcement would have been more appropriate. In general, you don’t want a presenter to just say what news are going to tell you in a few seconds, in the same way that a continuity announcer shouldn’t just duplicate what the opening of a programme does. But it’s far from the dreadful piece of television I had in my head. It’s just a tiny moment of awkwardness, rather than a fundamentally misconceived link.

But then it’s worth noting exactly how much of this I had, erm, entirely made up in my own head. I had assumed it was the intro into the actual breaking news report which was described at the top of this article. But that’s not actually stated in the initial anecdote: the phrase is simply “having to go [to] the News”, which is exactly what happens. Nowhere does it say it was the newsflash that was being described; that was entirely made up by me. And sure, while the presenter was Nicholas Witchell rather than Moira Stuart, that’s just an unimportant detail.

The fact remains that I’m someone who is interested in fact-checking anecdotes and getting things as right as possible… and my assumptions here still lead me down a path of nonsense which wasn’t actually part of the original memory of the incident. I filled in the gaps with things which simply didn’t happen.

No wonder bullshit spreads so easily. Even those determined to get things right make unfortunate leaps sometimes.

1. Although the direct handover by the presenters from Breakfast to Morning Live on BBC One today does retain a bit of Daytime UK DNA. ↩

2. All quotes from the paperwork have been slightly reformatted for readability, but nothing too drastic. ↩

3. Yes, all one word in the paperwork… ↩

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