[South]

I’ve had an eye on the news channel over the past few hours and the pacing has been a little strange.

At 11am things started off quite busy, with a headlines sequence that was followed by a series of live interviews with correspondents (both BBC and external) about election things. There was then a bit on the Post Office inquiry, which was interrupted for coverage of a live speech by the Lib Dems, before going back to discuss the inquiry again. Not a packaged report in sight, but it felt reasonably pacy and they covered a range of topics, albeit mostly election-related.

However, when they went back to the Post Office feed the second time round they proceeded to show it, uninterrupted, for nigh-on 45 minutes - it felt like everyone that had been putting the programme together up to that point had wondered off!

Ben Thompson was the presenter at 11am hour, so did he perhaps go to present Business Today on the World feed for half an hour? It was like returning to one of the single-story feeds they’ve been putting on the BBC News website, as with the exception of an occasional name caption for Paula Vennells, the story strap read ‘Ex-Post Office boss accused of living in ‘la-la land’’ for almost the entire time too. In days of old, this would have regularly been updated with quotes and further background to whatever was being discussed.

At around 12:10 things seemed to whir back into life, Ben Thompson reappeared and there was a further 50 minutes with a range of interviews and occasional clips. The Post Office inquiry got a couple of extra minutes in that time, but otherwise attention moved elsewhere.

Had the election not been called I bet the UK would still have opted out to show the post office enquiry, it's major news this week and Sky have been doing similar.
The thing I did notice was they opted out of the enquiry for key moment of the campaign trail followed by some analysis which was probably the correct approach.