[simon]

Would they need to fully staff a gallery just to do the heads? If London still has its own director, with the level of automation they should be able to run through two simple sequences by themselves. They probably need a floor manager for that time, but you might find that there's someone at a loose end at that time anyway. That way they could pre-record the headlines for B to play out, and it gives the director and presenter a chance to run through sequences before going on air to make sure they work.

If you were going to pre-record the heads wouldn't you do it in B?  I'd have thought the easiest way to do it was like they used to do the news bulletin into Marr, just from a DTL position elsewhere in NBH rather than Salford.

Counterintuitively, I don't think that would make sense.

Remember that the priority of the crew in B is always going to be the national bulletin. London will always take a back seat. This is why I would expect London to get their own director and time in another gallery (probably D) to prepare. The crew in B just won't have time to worry about London on a busy day.

If the plan were to pre-record the heads in B, it would probably work on your average day. But if it were a very busy day - of which we have had many in recent weeks - I'm not sure they would have time to do it in B.

With half an hour to transmission, the director of the national bulletin will want to be solely focused on their programme, and the last thing they will want is to have to spend 5-10 minutes pre-recording the London heads.

If there is a separate director for London it just makes far more sense for them to do it themselves in another studio and leave the national director to focus on their job.

In terms of why they would get B to play the London heads rather than have D opt out - this is speculation but maybe it's to ensure that the London director has plenty of time to get to gallery B. Sometimes they don't get to the mid headlines until after 20 past, and if the London director has to stay in D until that's done, they would really have to high tail it to get down to B in time.