Lockdown

The education offer for children, teachers and parents will aim to ensure all children can access curriculum-based learning, without needing access to the internet.

Starting Monday 11 January, CBBC will air a three-hour block of primary school programming from 9am, including BBC Live Lessons and BBC Bitesize Daily. The channel will also be showing other educational programming such as Our School and Celebrity Supply Teacher and favourites including Horrible Histories, Art Ninja and Operation Ouch.

With three ten-minute episodes, the vicar will be reflecting on the past extraordinary year, giving sermons on everything from making home-made wine to the danger of having Owen Newitt cut your hair. Geraldine will be joined by Hugo Horton (James Fleet) and some local primary school children.

The three sermons will then be compiled into a thirty-minute compilation which will air over Christmas on BBC One.

Dawn French said: “Back in the dog collar, back in Dibley and back on your telly at Xmas. I couldn’t be happier. Bless you.”

In April, Haworth was the first TV journalist to interview Captain Tom Moore, the Second World War veteran who walked around his garden to raise money for the NHS.

“We were right at the beginning of the lockdown and there was really grim news coming out about the virus,” she recalled. “At Anglia, we were always trying to find good news stories to lift the audience’s spirits – [Captain Tom] was just perfect.

“It’s really draining reporting on the pandemic because you’re living and breathing it, so it was really nice to have [a positive story] to report.”

This is the fourth version of this piece that I’ve written. I scrapped the previous three as “the news” made them immediately out of date. I’m going to plough on with this one, although I fear that, by the time it is published, it will be entirely irrele­vant thanks to world events, but hey ho. Like everyone, I’m resigned to the fact that there’s no way of predicting anything this year…

The past six months have been a period like no other in Ireland. Our lockdown has been followed by a partial lifting of restrictions that has us bobbing up and down between level two and level three of the pandemic regulations.

The good news is that production has resumed, and it is slightly surreal that Matt Damon, star of Contagion, a spooky thriller about a deadly virus and a global panic, has been spotted pottering about in Dalkey, a small seaside town south of Dublin, where he chose to spend lockdown.

Fran Unsworth used her recent conversation with the RTS to support incoming Director-General Tim Davie’s statement of 5 June, when he stressed the need for impartiality across the organisation, regardless of whatever battles between the BBC and government might be going on behind the scenes. “The more valuable we are to audiences, the greater our standing is going to be with the Government,” the BBC’s director of news and current affairs said firmly.

But the economic fallout from the lockdown will mean that the PSBs will face a fight to sustain the high-quality programmes and services to which audiences are accustomed.  

This stark message was made in a RTS Cymru Wales webinar featuring a panel made up of the heads of the country’s broadcasting organisations.

Taking part in “Broadcasting in Wales: Lockdown and beyond” were: Rhodri Talfan Davies, director of BBC Cymru Wales; Phil Henfrey, head of news and programmes at ITV Cymru Wales; and Owen Evans, chief executive of S4C.

“The biggest issue when we started gearing up to re-start production about six weeks ago was fear,” said John Whiston, who as ITV’s managing director of continuing drama is responsible for running flagship soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale.

He said that production staff and talent needed reassuring after being isolated at home watching news coverage of the pandemic every night for weeks.