I don’t know if you are familiar with the Your News strand on BBC News. It is a magazine-style, twenty-minute-or-so-long programme designed to showcase some of the more interesting stories sent in to the BBC via the Web and the phone. Each week the presenters are sent to a city in the UK and report on the issues affecting the people there, as well as one or two stories people from other cities have highlighted.
The concept itself is, without a doubt, a very good idea. It is an excellent way of using our BBC to vent our frustrations at the politics and everyday monotony that exists on our little island. The show even has a feature in which the bewildered residents of a city are approached and told to do a piece-to-camera about what they’d like to see more of on the news.
But, upon first look it is very clear who the target audience of Your News is. The presenter shots are ridiculously over-played. The dialogue itself is fine; there’s little sensationalism, which you’d expect in this style of programming. However, the camera work is beyond slick. It is beyond modern. It is simply awful.
The camera zooms in and out quickly in response to every comment made by the presenter. It rotates around said presenter in some sort of Matrix style clockwork. It pans around trees and lamp posts which block the presenter’s face over and over again and it slips in and out of this sloppy, wannabe-modern style of filming as it so pleases.
So after being held on the edge of your seat at the suspense, being bombarded with the opinions about the state of the news by people chosen ‘at random’, and finally feeling very sick at the sheer volume of camera movement and rotation, you don’t even have enough time to take it all in; the programme is just too short.
I did try and find a YouTube clip, but those Copyright Police have been out in force across the network so you’ll just have to make do with the BBC’s online version. Click here to watch the latest episode. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good show. But be warned: you may need a bucket.
UPDATE: As of today (9th December 2007) the YourNews video on bbc.co.uk hasn’t been updated since 3rd November so you may not be watching the most recent edition.
