[jaycee331]

With BBC News 24 effectively closing down, and new management for Sky News incoming, would it be too much to ask for some life to be added to the channel? There is a real window of opportunity for Sky here to really refresh Sky News and cement its place as the UK's premier news channel. I apologise to anyone reading this who works there, but at the moment it's about as visually engaging as watching paint dry. I know the orthodoxy there is 'no glamour, just the news', - but TV is a visual medium. It should at least be more than the wallpaper on a screen that it is now. 

I'm not saying go back to 2005 and have three presenters strutting around an aircraft hangar-turned-newsroom - god, no, that was totally the wrong approach, even if we here all loved it - but please just make it look good.

It really is a strange time for TV news. We're in an era of two new challengers in the market and instead of standing on their strengths, BBC News and Sky News just seem to have given up.

I noticeably miss the intimacy of that old shoebox set Adam Boulton would cram two guests into for a spirited argument. These new big bright open spaces remind me of the waiting area in a car showroom, and instead of being impressed by their cutting edge CGI integration, slapping a video wall on every side just comes across incredibly lazy. Maybe it's not the walls per-se but their graphics, because sometimes they use images on Sophie Ridge that look nice from a long shot, but on close-ups look like a child has a vomited crayons.

And what's happened after midnight? We've gone from a varied rota of presenters in the glass box to the same one or two faces on perma-night shifts, delivered with a static head and shoulders shot over several hours of the same endless garish plain blue CG background that is slightly too bright for my after midnight eyes.

Many of you will remember how much stick the glass box received when it first launched with dodgy audio and dreadful robocam angles, but eventually it got smoothed out and it's the only studio I enjoy seeing now because it has some physicality to it and isn't wrapped in CGI. It seems very under utilized nowadays?

Also can someone please tell Sky that the pandemic is over, and it's OK to turn off the zoom calls and bring guests back into the studio for round table debates again? I literally can't watch Press Preview anymore because they never returned to studio guests, which I am sure is comfier and cheaper for everyone, but a lot of the social dynamics and interplay is lost behind jittery, robotic sounding webcams with obvious time delays that lead to unnatural pauses and laughing/talking over one another. But it's not just the press show, it's like this across the schedule now, along with the too familiar "oh I'm sorry we seem to be having some difficulties with the connection".