[Mike]

And while consistency and a single BBC News brand is brillant, it was sad to say goodbye to those fantastic orchestral themes that were in use during the 1980s and 1990s.

To be fair, the BBC did sort of have a brand from 1993 onwards with that, George Fenton's orchestral arrangements, although they were different, followed the same structure and instrumentation and the sets were fundamentally the same with different colours and the titles were broadly the same.

This does bring me on to a question/statement though: the regions can often end up in a mess, and it's somewhat ironic that ITV have had, for a longer time than the BBC, the most consistent looking regional news branding (which is to be expected as they've centralised their design unit at Gas Street who produce nearly all graphics for every region) - despite its origins of being multiple companies. Meanwhile at the BBC it's a cycle of every region being identical for a year or two, then one of them gets brave and does something different, and so on

By the end of 2000 every BBC region looked similar, then LDN came about. 2002 everywhere else got a similar people in places title sequence, by 2005 all but one had dropped the 'official' corporate standard, some had different music (the strange non-David Lowe 'Points West' theme, or Newcastle using the closing titles as the opening titles spring to mind).

By the time 2008 came around there were at least 11 different title sequences and 6 different pieces of music being used to open the regional programmes on the BBC - Scotland were still using the 1999 titles (or a close approximation of).

So 2008 happened and everywhere would be dragged back on brand. By 2019 they were back to a similar picture to pre-2008.

So given we've had the 2019 titles and music for 5 years now - with some changes - and standardised sets, do we think regions will start trying to do their own thing soon, and what mechanisms are in place to stop a region deciding to 'go rogue' if they wanted to? I don't particularly want them to as it would ruin celebrity squares and probably wouldn't be a solid investment of our tax money, but it seems that these imposed corporate styles can only last so long before someone breaks away from it, and once one goes more follow.