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It's a busy studio

The programme comes to you live, five days a week, from studio 11 at Television Centre - once home to the one, six and nine o'clock news until main news production moved out to stage 6 a few years ago.

It then underwent a facelift and was refurbished with a new kit by BBC Studios to provide a versatile home for a whole host of programmes.

Now, it not only hosts The Morning Show, but Liquid News and 60 Seconds.

And from February 2003 it will also be used for the new 15 minute news programme for BBC Three.

The studio is about 1000 square feet in size and, although it's small, it is quite capable as the programme shows. It is a digital studio, using the latest technology to give the highest picture quality.

The output from the studio has been seen worldwide, with some features on BBC World, and Liquid News transmitted across Europe on BBC Prime. And it used to be seen weekly over the Atlantic on BBC America.

As you can tell, it has become a busy studio with sets shuffled about throughout the day.

These sets have to be brought up from the stores in a large goods lift as the studio is sited on the 6th floor.

Who's who around the studio

About 40 people work on The Morning Show - that's the whole behind the scenes and on-air team.

Three sound people, two floor managers, one lighting director, an engineer, lighting director, two tape operators, autocue operator, PA, vision mixer, director and editor.

The Morning Show's interactive elements are run by a team of three, although that's with a lot of help from developers, designers and our technology support teams.

In the studio

There are four cameras in the studio including a Jimmy Jib which gets us all sorts of fancy shots - dramatically high, or low, or a quick whizz from one to the other.

There is also a camera in the gallery to give you a behind the scenes look at putting the programme together.

Unlike a lot of other News studios, all our cameras are operated by people rather than machines.

This lack of robotic computer automated techno-telly extends into the gallery.

We use old-fashioned bits of tape for running all the items in the studio - again, unlike the prevailing trend to get everything played out from servers and run under the control of a master computer.

In both cases, however, this adherence to the old fashioned way of doing things is not because of any technophobic tendencies, or because we're stingy: the old ways work well for the shows we do.

Robotic cameras cannot do the shots that real people can achieve.

Technology

As well as Digital Beta tape playout we have some of the latest disc based recording and playout systems.

As well as PC based still-stores, the set consists of eight big plasma screens and an enormous back projector.

These all combine to link you to footage from outside the studio and to bring you your votes and comments about issues of the day!

Technicalities

The vision mixer is a Pinnacle PDS 9000, with 2 M/E banks and a PGM/PST bank. It's very sophisticated, and is used to control all the screens on the set in the studio.

We also have a Pinnacle Lightning still store and an Aston Motto.

The VTs are all Sony Digibeta recorders, and we have a Doremi hard disk recorder too.

The cameras are all Panasonic KY 29D models and the lenses are a combination of Fuji wide and narrow angle units.

On the set, we have 6 Fujitsu 61" plasma screens, 2 NEC plasmas and three Pioneer 50" plasmas.

The big screen uses a Sanyo XF10 projector.