[Stuart]

Why bring in another camera when you already have 7 covering every possible angle you can imagine in your wildest dreams?

Taking a guess the start of the new financial year has enabled the additional resource.

Maybe the justification was that with past faults with the cameras they want to mitigate the risk one of more failing during the programme, given they often have high profile political interviews. At least if one or more robotic cameras develops a fault the manually operated camera can cover those shots.

I doubt that would ever be an issue when you have other cameras in the studio that can cover multiple shots.

If you had a complete 'Electric Friends' sytems failure in Studio B, then you'd be hot-footing it to Studios D, E, K, L or V.

There was no complete system failure, as all the cameras using those shots were shown to be working at other times during the programme. Now I'll wait for one of our techy friends who work there to tell me there was an issue which caused them to use a Steadicam - then I will gorge on 'Humble Pie' for the rest of the week.