Production bosses at the UK’s biggest broadcasters have lifted the lid on the challenges of organising their election night programming within six weeks.
Broadcasters expecting an October election had to work around an unexpectedly early date, some technical mishaps and, in the case of Channel 4, starting the campaign without a studio in place.
Chairing an event at ITN on Thursday, Jon Roberts, its director of technology, production and innovation, said he would “argue with anybody that election programmes are the hardest thing to put together. I think they’re the most extraordinary achievement in television.
“You can name any massive high-profile event and I’m not sure any come with the same combination of factors — the amount of outside sources, the graphics and results, the workflow which underpins the whole show.
“Normally, we’re doing something super ambitious in the studio at the same time. We’re building this whilst doing the campaign [coverage]. We’re all doing it, and we’re all aware that there’s going to be reviews the next morning and every decision that we make as part of that.
“And just the general predictability of all of that through the night — there’s so much content on election night, you could run the same programme 30 times and make 30 different programmes based on thousands of decisions that are happening in those control rooms.”
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Channel 4: ‘Not having the luxury of a studio that we could call home was a big issue’
Perhaps the most dramatic subject of these pressures was Channel 4, which Roberts explained had “the slight disadvantage of having, at the point the election was called, no office, no team, no studio, no programme plan, no infrastructure”.
Channel 4 does not produce its own shows in-house, instead commissioning outside companies for all its content. ITN produces news programming for Channel 4 as well as ITV and Channel 5.
But unlike ITV, which had a large studio at the ITN building ready to use for the election, Channel 4’s studio was too small for a major overnight election programme — so it began the campaign effectively “homeless”.
Roberts said, as a result, the overnight election show “was more of a traditional production programme commission — except for the fact it’s nine, ten hours, 11 hours and it’s six weeks away”.
ITN Productions assistant head of productions John Keyes helped put the show together and said they started “literally from scratch”.
“When that starting gun went we were like — ‘right, where are we going to do this?’… Being homeless for a while and not having the luxury of a studio that we could call home was a big issue.”
After deciding that Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire would be somewhat unwieldy for London-based guests, Channel 4 ended up broadcasting from Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. But they had to take the second-largest studio, which required ITN to “reconfigure our set entirely to fit into a smaller studio space”.
He added that “Riverside Studios were brilliant — they’re very used to doing live shows, but they’re certainly not kitted out in the same way that a broadcast studio like ITN, BBC or Sky would be.
“They don’t have an MCR [media control room] to call home like ours [in the ITN offices]. We’re very much dealing with a normal TX [transmission] studio — four lines into the building, four lines out. Trying to make that work for election night coverage is just a massive OB [outside broadcast], essentially.”
The show ended up bringing on Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy to co-present with Emily Maitlis who usually presents podcast The News Agents, alongside The Rest is Politics hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart and polls analysis from Professor Hannah Fry.
[Read more: Election 2024 — How broadcasters covered UK general election]
Keyes said he spent election night “in a converted crew break room sat down in front of the computer with about 100 Whatsapp channels for our various locations, just hoping we had enough people and enough equipment in the right place at the right time.
“And we did — the result was brilliant for us.”
The ITN staff working on Channel 4’s election night show did not get access to their studio until the Monday before the Thursday 4 July election, Keyes said, and they were out of it by Friday.
“That was it from point to point. We got the set [and] the lighting sorted over Monday and Tuesday and then we technically rigged Tuesday night and into Wednesday.”
They had one in-person, four-hour rehearsal period, and a separate graphics rehearsal period, “and that was it”.
“It was just unbelievable in the timeframe that we had,” Keyes said.
[Read more: Inside Channel 4 News on the day a rain-soaked Rishi Sunak set the date]
Morwen Williams, the director of media operations at BBC News, said it had not been smooth sailing at the national broadcaster either.
Less than an hour before the exit poll went live at 10pm, Williams said, the main steadicam in their New Broadcasting House studio stopped working properly.
“That was a very worrying hour,” she said. “We had Plan B and Plan C lined up but luckily we got it back… What I would have hoped was a calm before the busyness was not quite as calm. It was quite frantic, that 90 minutes.”
The BBC trialled several new coverage and production features at this election, including a stream of the radio overnight programme which Williams said “was nearly the one that broke us, but we did it… It got a great iPlayer audience, who knew?”
The BBC also managed to get a camera at every constituency count.
“It was an iPhone with a tripod,” Williams explained. “All the iPhone had on it was the app to go live. It had been charged up already — literally, you take one out of the [package] tube and you turn the iPhone on. You’ve got one option, you hit play, you’re on air.
“And that was it. And we had, was it, 369 of those? And we’ve got most of them back. A few left to chase up.
“And that worked really well. You never saw that full screen [of the count] — you always saw that as a multi-view.”
Sky News output editor Phipps commented that broadcasters were “always looking at each other’s work” and that there’s “a bit of cross-fertilisation” between them — noting that he has a Guinness World Record on his wall at home for having overseen 139 live web feeds from counts during the 2015 general election.
[Read more: Election TV ratings — BBC is clear winner but Channel 4 doubles 2019 audience]
Sky News: ‘We rehearsed for lots of other eventualities’
For its 2024 coverage, Phipps said, Sky News had “a stringer at every single count in the country.
“At this last election we were live at about 82, 85 different locations, some with Sky crews, others with students who we’d given cameras to — something we started doing back in 2015. We’ve actually got some of those students now working at Sky News, including on screen, so it’s created a fantastic production line of experience.”
He added: “Everyone thinks they knew what the result was going to be but believe me, we rehearsed for lots of other eventualities.
“What we knew was it was going to be historic, because either Labour were going to return to power or the Conservatives were going to succeed in doing something that no other government had done [and] effectively win yet another election victory.”
He said they had made sure to rehearse the graphics thoroughly, too: “It’s the only show you can work on where technically you could get sent to jail if you put a graphic on too early. So we have a lot of rehearsals — I’m sure everyone else does — [to figure out] how do we ensure the exit poll does not go on air before 10 o’clock.”
[Read more: Sky’s Sam Coates reveals his election formula — 18-hour days, power naps and gallons of Huel]
ITV News: ‘Our whole build and design plan’ was for an October election
Jenny King, the head of technical production at ITN, was involved in both putting together ITV’s election night programme and producing coverage of the campaign.
She said the team had been taken aback by the timing of the election.
“We didn’t plan for the election to be when it was,” King said. “And our whole build and design plan was for the election to be — well, I was going with October the 17th. But that was proved wrong.
“So we managed it. It was really challenging. Although in hindsight it worked really well, and I’m really, really pleased that the team was able to pull it off.
“The challenge is producing the day-to-day news bulletins out of the same studio that we’re also trying to rehearse a massive election programme [in]. And I think that’s where our second studio space did come into its own”
Panel moderator Roberts commented that, “as far as I remember, everything we said was impossible in July, and only possible in October, we did in July”.
King said that was “pretty much right”, adding: “I think there were massive benefits to the July election — not least it’s not now bang up against the US election, so it gives everybody a bit of a breather.”
[Read more: News and politics page views reach record high in 2024 election week]
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