[interestednovice]

This is going to sound a stupid comment but it’s amazing how different the sets can look with a different background (if you know what I mean). It feels very flat and boxy in that photo, which you don’t notice with the usual cityscape backdrops.

Not a stupid comment at all, and I completely see what you mean. The cityscape backdrops do work well to give the sets much more depth and interest. It’s easy for the boxy nature of the physical space to be noticeable with other backdrops, such as in debate mode here.

However, the debate setup still looks rather good, it’s certainly adequate and really shows the flexibility of the sets. If they’d tried to do debates with the old sets, they would still have looked very like the “News mood”. It’s great to be able to set up different programme styles for things like this quite easily.