[Former Member 406]

It's now been nearly 5 weeks since BBC Channel Islands de-camped to a temporary set (on Monday 6th February).

Given the unlikelihood that their new set will be made out of LED screens, but more simple/basic set wall materials (and therefore will not require the same levels of build time/testing/piloting etc that a tech-heavy set would), it surely can't be too much longer before they're back in the main studio?

I do hope that it will nevertheless be as much like the standard sets being rolled out elsewhere as possible, in all regards other than its size and the lack of ability for the backdrop to animate/change.

Do we know it's a temporary set? The studio location appears to be the same, they've just extended the background of the original set in order to remove the TV and make it fit better with the new sofa.

Well... the screen is now a "plasma on a stick", which is rather a downgrade from having a screen properly embedded into a piece of sturdy set wall. Surely this element alone has "temporary set" written all over it?

Also... during the last 6:30pm edition before the current apparent decamp, the presenter said something along the lines of "from Monday, we'll be on the same sofa but with slightly different surroundings".

The previous set had two walls at right angles. One of which was the aforementioned red wall with a TV screen in it, the other had the printed blurry newsroom/skyline (whatever) backdrop on it and looked to be completely smooth and flat (e.g. printed on stiff boards).

The current backdrop looks to be pretty much a single wall with a gentle curve to it overall (approximately following the curve of the sofa), rather than two walls meeting at right angles. The blurry backdrop looks to be an extended version of the same image as before, but is clearly printed on some sort of plastic sheeting stretched over a framework as it has tell-tale creases etc in places. Again, this screams "temporary set".

I have started to wonder if the lengthy de-camp is due to structural work to make the proper studio bigger.

I wonder if the current/previous pokey studio was created in the first place out of existing space at the BBC Radio Jersey building (e.g. plasterboard walls erected to carve up part of the existing newsroom/office, or similar)?

In which case, add in factors such as the post-pandemic rise of working-from-home, and they may now need less office space than before, so could be carving things up differently to make a more spacious studio?

Maybe even one with enough room for the new set to have LED screen walls after all (allowing for things like minimum legal fire lane distance behind the LED walls, and the internal space of the set as seen on-air still allowing the cameras to not be too close to the faces of the LED screens). This could mean doing something similar to the new Sport/Breakfast set in Salford - i.e. not a physically walled studio as such, but the LED set walls and lighting rig simply being built in open newsroom space?