BBC Breakfast 2023 – Present

On 26th June 2023 BBC Breakfast relaunched from a new shared studio space on the ground floor of BBC Quay House, MediaCity in Salford. The new set is based on the look of Studio B, London where the national news is made. Breakfast now has matching studio towers and a catwalk for business explainers and weather. It looks great, a light, bright, airy studio, much more fitting for a national morning news programme than its previous small space shared with North West Tonight. Bravo! 

Now for the negative points – unlike the nations and regions new sets which follow the set design of Studio B London, Breakfast features its own look for their screens reusing the previous landscape of Media City, which has been crudely cutout and stuck over a bright blue sky, that towers over the presenters unlike the subtlety of the sunrise sky in the previous studio. It’s all a bit a fake and could be much nicer.

The new branding features as before, orange as the primary colour and reuses drone images of Media City for the titles. A new big blue circle has been added to the mix, not sure what this blue bouncing ball is supposed to represent? Sadly the branding is now a mish-mash of styles – BBC News lower thirds mixed with rounded box Breakfast style lower thirds. The new colour palette is very entertainment in style, not very appropriate for serious news stories and the logo animations are so very simple (sigh) lacking any imagination. The whole look is more like GMTV from the 2000s. Such a missed opportunity to reinvent the programme branding with something much more contemporary and striking like ITV’s Good Morning Britain which is so cohesive.

The music package was not updated either, a refresh to the theme would have been really nice. Let’s hope the powers that be have a bit more imagination and relaunch the programme branding to match the brilliant set upgrade.

Examples of the different camera shots and presentation areas used in the new Salford studio.

Examples of content graphics