[Rdd]

I did like that era of Sky News indeed Sky of that era and before it was more brash and unique where todays Sky is more mainstream so you don’t really see the brashness anymore in its presentation.

I really think that was the worst Sky News ever was - the “slug” in particular (especially at first before it was reduced in size) made it look like a tabloid red top. The Newswall was great, mind you, but when it went into Breaking News mode it looked horrific.

You also have to appreciate that was the era when Sky News moved away from its original “news on the hour, features on the half hour” format to a purely rolling news format. A lot of those features programmes were dumped overnight (in the middle of the day, actually!) when the 2001 general election was called and originally it was thought the plan was to bring them back but that never happened and they all ended very abruptly which a lot of fans of those programmes (especially Martin Stanford’s Technofile) were unhappy about. Even bulletin names disappeared from on-screen at least for a while.

And the debacle with the theme music suddenly being replaced for rights reasons - little did we know that the melody it was hastily replaced with would still be with us 20 years later! That first version wasn’t great, but then it got a brill orchestral rendition at the 2005 relaunch which has never been bettered.