[RhysJR]

Back to the news (or lack of it) - and what in hindsight seemed a pretty poor judgement call on ITV Wales' part last night.

The whole of Wales at Six was devoted to the 40th anniversary of the miners' strike - and no one can deny that quite a lot of effort had gone into it.

Unfortunately, it was a fairly heavy news day with Wales' chief medical officer appearing at the UK Covid inquiry (which is meeting in Cardiff at the moment - quite a lot of revelations have emerged from that) and the minister responsible for implementing the 20mph speed limit (former political editor Lee Waters) announcing he was to resign after the new First Minister is elected.

What was pretty telling for me was there was a live cross to Adrian Masters at the Senedd - and you could instinctively tell how frustrated he was that instead of reporting on these stories, he was throwing over to an interview with Michael Heseltine about the legacy of the strike.

Surely it would have been better to spin off into a separate peak-time programme?

www.itv.com 

Completely agree. I was surprised there wasn't a news in brief segment at least because as you say, there was plenty of other news that should have been covered in depth. It feels like an occasion when BBC Wales Today could have flexed to produce an hour long programme to cover other stories alongside devoting plenty to the special edition's topic (like they did on the day of Mark Drakeford's resignation when they had over 20 minutes of other news). Sadly, that's not really possible for ITV Wales or anyone on ITV at large with live national news and Emmerdale immediately following.

Last night ended up having more Welsh current affairs on the national news with Rhys Williams doing a live on potential senior doctors strike action.

One other thing, I'm not sure if this was special to ITV Wales last night, but there was no ad break between the regional weather and the start of the national news.