[Worzel]

But that sort of thing is not unique to now.

Take when the News channel moved to N6 and shared with the national news from 2008. You'd end up with the 'BBC Ten O'clock News Hour' being half presented by the network presenter on BBC One and then the other half by the evening News channel presenter with the rather awkward half past pause, and... 'now with the rest of the Ten O'clock news hour here's Chris Eakin etc'. Why the network presenter couldn't stay on to finish the back half hour never made sense.

Then you'd have the silliness of a weekend network bulletin going out at 17:20, with a separate presenter coming in to read almost the same set of stories that the news channel presenter had just read out. When the network bulletin started at 17:05 you could end up with 2 headline sequences in 5 minutes read by 2 different presenters. There was always opportunities to make cutbacks if needed there but it was never done.

The BBC do it with the One now where the network presenter stays on but why not for the Six and Ten? There's no real reason why the BBC One presenter can't stay on to finish off the back half hours at those times? You'd then end up squeezing out 3 full hours on UK-focussed news at relatively peak times.

The BBC never really learnt anything from how the ITV News Channel did things with the ITV network presenter would often stay on to back-fill the channel saying something like 'join me/us over the ITV News channel in a few minutes when we'll be talking about X, Y, and Z'.

I suspect it's all down to internal politics!

Well, no, you're absolutely right. After the move to N6, Peter Sissons insisted on presenting any network bulletins that fell during his NC shift, which made perfect sense, and as you say, should have been done across the board. He thought the same as you do - that the 'musical chairs' thing was pointless. 

I think the reason what you suggest can't be done with the Six or Ten is that BBC London comes from the same studio? It would probably be a tall order to power up studio C for 25 minutes and have the presenter rush there with such a short lead time. Though saying that, it might be good if perhaps whoever was down for each network bulletin did an hour of UK news before (say, 11-12, 3-4, 8-9?). Just an idea - I haven't really thought it through.

Sorry, edited my post. I added a piece about moving BBC London to studio D.

I never knew Peter Sissons insisted on doing that - kudos to him!