[Deejay]

Cambridge’s part of the Look East patch has a larger population than Norwich’s. Most of the larger cities and conurbations are in the West. The facilities are newer and easier to get to than those in Norwich. Yet it was Cambridge that had to go because it was still considered a sub-opt, despite producing their own half hours every weeknight for years.

Oxford had been under-resourced for a long time, but at it’s peak produced 4 opts every weekday: 1520, 1830, 2000, 2225, a full half hour on Fridays and regular pan-regionals to assist with scheduling clashes in Southampton. Yet it never had a technical team of more than 4 + 1 crew camera op, and relied on as much multi skilling as it could (all the journalists could self-shoot and edit). A lot of Oxford’s equipment was up-cycled from other regions: the studio lamps and cameras came from Southampton Studio B and were in use right to the end, the vision mixer and monitor multi-viewer were ex BBC Manchester brought down in 2012, the Aston was ex Leeds having done the Hull Sub-Opt, then was successfully revived when it’s power supply blew up with bits from Cardiff and Southampton.

It’s very sad for the staff affected in both sites, but it’s more a shame for the viewers who will be left with poorer coverage of where they live as a result. If you search for the geographical area where I live in the BBC app, you get no results at all. You have to go for the county names, which is largely irrelevant. There is no section on the news website for the areas served by the old Oxford and Cambridge sub-regions - just “Oxford”, “Cambridgeshire” or “Beds Herts & Bucks” which annoyingly spans bits of both. Saying it’s to adjust staffing to work on Digital Coverage doesn’t quite stack up when the service you once got from linear TV simply doesn’t exist on the replacement “digital” offerings.