Vannessa the BBC ONE announcer.. Posted Wed Apr 19 23:48:59 BST 2000 by Blake Connolly

Just thought I'd let you know about a real TV treat I saw the other day...

I was hopping around daytime TV when I found the last few minutes of Vannessa Fatz' awwwwful Talking TV programme. There she was, in what used to be known as The Broom Cupboard and is now a bit of a plain old room.

She was doing a feature on continuity announcers and had as her guide the one I could only describe as young-newish-female-BBC1 announcer. She thought it would be fun to do a link herself, and so prepared to do the junction between Neighbours and Bergerac (incidentally, and off the subject, I tuned past Bergerac's opening titles today and noticed they've whacked a new BBC logo on them - I'm not a fan of Bergerac but messing around of old shows like that is a bit much!)

Anyway, back to the point.. first of all she had to talk over the credits of Neighbours, and nudged her fader up half an inch, so the proper announcer had to come and do push it the rest of the way up for her - duh! This resulted in half of what she said not being heard. After that she did the link into Bergerac (with the announcer doing the levels for her this time). When they played the tape back, you saw that she didn't fit her words into the 6-second ident and started talking into the start of the show, and then the announcer started saying how she read the words out as if she didn't care what she was saying.

By the way, there doesn't seem to be the vast amounts of buttons and knobs in there that there used to be, just a set of faders pretty much. Presumably nearly everything's done by the directors and the computers these days.

Subject: Re: Vannessa the BBC ONE announcer.. [ Previous Message ]
Posted By Richard Bell on Thu Apr 20 09:52:11 BST 2000:

>By the way, there doesn't seem to be the vast amounts of buttons and knobs in there that there used to be, just a set of faders pretty much. Presumably nearly everything's done by the directors and the computers these days.

Yeah, certainly in the digital suites you can schedule everything and the computer will play trailers, captions and symbols straight off the hard disk and all the continuity director has to do worry about the levels and stuff. OK - thats a bit of an over-simplification, and if a programme is running late it may have to be done manually.
>

Subject: Re: Vannessa the BBC ONE announcer.. [ Previous Message ]
Posted By Jase on Thu Apr 20 12:41:43 BST 2000:

>>By the way, there doesn't seem to be the vast amounts of buttons and knobs in there that there used to be, just a set of faders pretty much. Presumably nearly everything's done by the directors and the computers these days.
>
>Yeah, certainly in the digital suites you can schedule everything and the computer will play trailers, captions and symbols straight off the hard disk and all the continuity director has to do worry about the levels and stuff. OK - thats a bit of an over-simplification, and if a programme is running late it may have to be done manually.
>>
>

I know what you mean. I was shown around an old style continuity suite, and the on-duty announcer was responsible for all manner of things. Preparing the "coming next" slides (I was there during the transition from actual 16mm slides to a computer -- on that occasion the announcer was responsible for both), cueing the idents, actually doing some of the switching and some other things as well. This being Tyne Tees TV, this all had to be done in-vision as well. When you put on top of that the fact that they have to read from an autocue (a piece of paper stuck under a vertically-positioned camera in their case!) and look effortless and professional, I have the utmost respect for these presenters and have to say that it must be one of the most difficult jobs around.

Vanessa Feltz probably thought she could just come in and do it in 5 minutes, well I've got news for you Vanessa, these guys have more talent in their little finger than you have in your entire body.

Subject: Re: Vannessa the BBC ONE announcer.. [ Previous Message ]
Posted By Anonymous on Sun Apr 30 22:09:56 BST 2000:

you sad sad people

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