No repeats

Zoe Barnes Zoe Barnes — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 10:41:57 +0000

A striking blonde A-level student ripped open the envelope containing her results, grabbed her best friend and literally leapt around with joy as she saw she had got the grades she needed to read English at university. Then slowly, as the interview continued, her face crumpled as the realisation dawned that she had got an A grade in the wrong subject, and a B in English, which might not be enough to secure her place.

As a viewer (and programme editor) I lived the moment with her and sat open-mouthed as she rushed off camera to check it out, leaving our reporter to wrap up the item and hand back.

That was yesterday morning’s edition of BBC Breakfast. A live programme. You can't make it up. And we don't.

So I am wondering about Mark Lawson's source of information for his piece in yesterday's Guardian in which he claims we've recently started to repeat live discussions, where previously we might have run a TAPE of an earlier version.

He is quite simply wrong. We have never run tape repeats of interviews and certainly have never pretended a tape was live. We are not currently obsessed with 'honesty' as he suggests - we have always been obsessed with honesty.

The reason we don’t run tapes is because it looks and feels repeated. Why would we say “here is an interview we did earlier”, when we can ask the guests to stay on, and with a new contributor, discuss the issue again? Something new might emerge, and often does.

Our audience knows they are watching a live show and apart from pre-filmed features and news clips, that is what they get, gaffes and all.

So yes, we repeat things at times on a three and a quarter hour programme, but very different audiences are watching.

As Mark correctly points out, not many people see the show from beginning to end (37 minutes on average at the last count). Sometimes the guest even appears on several BBC platforms consecutively. We think that can offer good value for the licence fee payer, as many different consumers of BBC News benefit from one booking.

If you were watching for longer you might have seen our A-level student interviewed on BBC News 24 later in the morning, when she confirmed that she hadn't got her first choice of university but was hoping she would get her second. As I said, live TV – the same story but it had moved on.

UPDATE 1500: BBC Breakfast presenter Sian Williams has also written a response to Mark Lawson's article here...

]]>"Mark Lawson's article about 'live repeats' suggested that 'recent scandals' had prompted Breakfast to change the way it conducted discussions. It hasn't.

"Having presented the programme for more than seven years, I can assure you we have never in my time, pre-recorded a debate to play it out later in the programme. It wouldn't work editorially. Hundreds of viewers e-mail, phone and text us immediately after we discuss an issue on air - comments which influence and inform the discussion later on. More than five million people watch Breakfast every day, we'd be doing them a disservice if we asked for their views and didn't use them.

"Also, an interviewee will often give a different answer the second time around, especially those who are not 'pundits'. The experience of being interviewed live can be intimidating, they usually feel more comfortable about voicing their opinions in the next interview. I'd be very happy for Mark to visit us at the programme and see how it all works in practice."

The Editors - Zoe Barnes

No repeats