UFO Info Week-End

It also wants to put on more cutting edge comedy than that available for broadcast before 9pm

It also wants to put on more cutting edge comedy than that available for broadcast before 9pm.BBC1 and BBC2 will work closer together to hold viewers from ITV by getting them on to BBC2 while the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News, which has about 5 million viewers, is broadcast. BBC2 will screen more populist shows at 9pm that run for half an hour. ITV claimed it needed to move the news so it can run films and dramas uninterrupted after the watershed. Arguably, the most famous of all came from Reginald Bosanquet.

News At Ten always encouraged a cult of personality around its newsreaders – in strict opposition to the BBC, which in the Fifties did not even show newsreaders and, when it later did, refused to put their names on screen.The news-free ITV evening schedule has prompted BBC schedulers to set up a strategy aimed at holding on to viewers after 9pm. It was the first time British television had shown a killing on screen.The final good-bye was said by seven former News At Ten newsreaders who were spliced together from their days saying “goodnight” on screen. The producers hired an entire Air France passenger aircraft so one editor could bring the film back to London.The oldest footage came from the programme’s reports on the war in Biafra from 1967 to 1970. News At Ten broke new ground when it filmed a rebel begging for his life before being executed by Nigerian soldiers. The centrepiece of the footage was the Vietnam war and the image of Kim Phuc, a young girl running towards the camera, the skin hanging from her body as she fled the napalm bombing of Trang Bang in June 1972.Another famous piece of footage was of three aircraft being blown up in the desert by Palestinian hijackers in Jordan in 1970. The final news programme ran an extended, six-minute festival of itself in a last “And Finally” slot.

A clearly emotional Trevor McDonald had gone to work early to write his final words, thanking the programme’s 7 million viewers for their patronage and attention over three decades.
A trawl through its archive was dominated by its coverage of war and disaster. NEWS AT TEN bowed out of the schedules last night with a nostalgic celebration of its 32 years on air as other broadcasters geared up to fight ITV for late evening viewers. Buy in the end, what most people will remember about it are two catch-phrases: “And finally” and “Bong” It’s hardly the stuff of which headlines are made.. Other stories, the rehousing of informants in the Stephen Lawrence case and the death of Lord Denning were bustled through with little sustained analysis; and of course, there was a lengthy obituary for itself.Once News at Ten changed the way we thought about news, and the way we thought about the world around us.

With the advent of multi-channel broadcasting, it began to look decidedly staid and slow off the mark; meanwhile, those who look for serious, in-depth coverage are more likely to turn to Channel 4 News.Last night’s final programme was typical: the only foreign news story treated in any depth was President Clinton’s comments on Monica Lewinsky. And it brought us the amusing final item – as last night’s programme put it, “skateboarding dogs and waterskiing squirrels”.But as the television market-place has hotted up, it has become something of a millstone round the network’s neck. Viewers, unused to seeing the world at such close quarters, were stunned.
It brought some astounding images into people’s lives: the naked Vietnamese girl, napalm-scorched skin peeling off her back as she ran down the road, was one of them. So what does it say about News At Ten that it can be the object of so much fuss and affection?

In the late 1960s, News At Ten brought a new seriousness and immediacy to reporting: it was the first 30-minute news programme on British television, the first programme to have reporters speaking to camera rather than having their words voiced over in the studio.