Inside Out Upside Down

Given that ITV barely does any local or regional news, it seems a bit unfair to target the BBC’s programme – Inside Out – that covers the English regions. And I’m not.
But for reasons I can’t really explain, I decided to go channel surfing in the 970s and 980s on Sky to see what stories all the regional BBC services were covering.
BBC East, covering East Anglia, had a story covering “legal highs”: drugs that are legally available to buy and which are potentially as dangerous as illegal drugs. A good story you might think. You can read more here – and see the episode later once it’s encoded, on the iPlayer.
Then I flicked over to BBC Oxford. They were also covering “legal highs”.
Aha. Clever. Reusing the same story that’s relevant in other parts of the UK!
Umm. No.
They’d made an entirely different (but somewhat better) version of the same story. So while the BBC East reporter was wandering around shops in Norwich and Colchester buying dubious drugs, in Oxford the friend of someone who’d died after taking drugs was doing something similar. The Oxford interviews were of a higher calibre if I’m being honest too.
You can see the BBC Oxford (or BBC South) version of the story here, again once it’s been encoded.
It’s possibly not surprising that a relevant story gets shown in more than one region, but it’s a shame that the two reporting teams couldn’t have pooled resources, or planned more carefully the fact that they’d each be producing the same story.
Of course – there always has been a massive rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge…


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4 responses to “Inside Out Upside Down”

  1. Andy Buckingham avatar
    Andy Buckingham

    I agree, a questionable use of resources, however I can only assume the argument would be that material related to Oxford “couldn’t” sit within the East bulletin and vice-versa. I would guess that the producers are tasked with delivering a programme entirely focussed on their patch?

  2. Adam Bowie avatar

    I agree. Clearly these are supposed to be local programmes, and both reports had local angles.
    It just seems odd, and perhaps unfortunate…

  3. PF avatar
    PF

    Surely both were also just a re-working of the fairly poor reportage prog that George Lamb did for bbc3…..? Perhaps there’s no such thing as new news.

  4. Adam Bowie avatar

    Ah. George Lamb. Well known reporter. I think somehow I missed that BBC3 show. Like I missed “Young Butcher of the Year” which I see he presented via Harry Hill’s TV Burp.