BBC North West Tonight covers the Northern North West of England rather more than ITV Granada Reports

16th October 2021

If you live in Lancashire you should always pick BBC1 North West Tonight over ITV1 Granada Reports if you want geographically- appropriate coverage. On Thursday evening, BBC1 North West Tonight had two news-features about Cumbria- one about raw sewage getting into Lake Windermere and the second about Moorside, next to Sellafield in west Cumbria being the proposed site of nuclear fusion power generation. There was also a mention about high Covid-19 cases in Barrow-in-Furness. There has also been two to three items of news-coverage about Lancashire each night of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday last week on BBC1 North West Tonight. Meanwhile, ITV1 Granada Reports has not had this amount of coverage of places north of Wigan- and South Cumbria only received one mention on this Regional News programme last week.

It is as consistent as the rain-bearing systems associated with depressions that always push in from the west at this time of year- or the Sun which rises above the east-southeast horizon at 7.30 to 8.am at this time of year: BBC1 North West Tonight inevitably covers Lancashire and south Cumbria in output better than does ITV1 Granada Reports. Thus, if viewers in the more northern areas of North West England (except northern Cumbria) want more geographic-appropriate news-coverage they should choose BBC1 North West Tonight over ITV1 Granada Reports every time. Meanwhile viewers in South Manchester, Liverpool and Cheshire should watch ITV1 Granada Reports because the metropolitan south of North West England and Cheshire are consistently heavily-covered by ITV1 Granada Reports.

However, for South Cumbria and North Lancashire, viewers should try and get ITV1 News Border Lookaround followed by BBC1 North West Tonight to get the best all- round local news-coverage. If you cannot get a signal for ITV1 News Border (parts of Lancaster and most of Morecambe can in fact get it), you can usually find a link to the most recent main evening bulletin on their website (here: https://www.itv.com/news/border). This is because, although BBC1 North West Tonight usually covers Lancashire fairly well the programme does not always have news about Cumbria- and sometimes their coverage does not get north of Preston. If you feel you have to watch ITV1 News Border’s Lookaround – to get better coverage of areas just north of your community do drop an e-mail to BBC1 North West programmers at nwt@bbc.co.uk and explain why you feel it necessary to do this.