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…