Through the square windows

Morecambe and Wise used to call it "news from the betting shop".  During my brief period in BBC TV News, in the early 1970s, the news reader would appear in front of camera shots of the real newsroom - either actually sitting on a subs desk for summaries, or overlaid by chroma-key from a studio. Several problems ensued. The major one was that, by the time the bulletin was on the air, all the subs had done their work, and were either in the studio or had gone - the mighty newsroom looked empty. Then viewers complained that people walking around in the background were distracting - so a floor manager was introduced, to corral all staff out of sight, apart from one typist deemed trustworthy enough not to wave to her mum.  Quite soon after this innovation, the live robotic camera in the newsroom pivoted to a shot of less risky Venetian blinds, used as the background for the remainder of the bulletins. Then someone started fiddling with the blinds, and the camera shot was replaced by a beautiful still of pristine Venetians.

I'm not sure when back projections first became fashionable for tv news sets. They offered big changing images over the shoulders over presenters - without the funny edges of chroma-key. It used to be that you had a choice of either real photographs for your background or the work of a graphic designer. In recent years, the arrival of the laser disc allowed the graphic designer to add movement.  Now the favoured backgrounds for BBC News have distant shots of pretend newsrooms, with pretend subs watching pretend computer screens, while pretend lifts rise and fall in the cavernous space that emphasises the mega-resources.

Breakfast and the 10 O'Clock News have always favoured this heightened "reality", where a graphic designer is given a brief, and then, with or without medication, tweaks it on a special scale that clearly exists, with arrows pointing, variously, to Dali, El Greco, Lowry and Grand Theft Auto.  On the first day of Breakfast from Salford, two of the pretend windows had views of the roofs of a pseudo-Brookside estate - they don't seem to have made it to Day Two.  Still enough graphic conceits do survive. Here are my favourites.