Stephen Neal

@stephen-neal.bsky.social

BBC Studios Live Studio/OB director. Love a green sofa at 7 on BBC One & Eurovision any time. Ex-BBC News/BBC Three/Look East. Speak Swedish. Once an engineer.

Language models are terrible at counting (part 12381...) It's concerning how many workflows/copilots etc. these tools are now creeping into, despite making small numerical errors all over the place (which a causal eye might not catch). Below from GPT-5 and Sonnet-4.5:

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Busy little day - I may sound like a scratched record but I love our team. The One Show Production Management, Editorial, Guest Producers, Presenters and just as importantly our amazing crew always pull it out of the bag.

Calum Scott on The One Show piazza performing 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' as a duet with LED screens showing Whitney Houston, and beautiful lighting.
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Crikey. Just realised that this month marks the 30th anniversary of me getting my first job directing live TV… (Look East BBC Regional News in Norwich - the best possible place I could have started!)

Lots of terrible & misinformed takes on Poland tonight, proving once again how shallow the coverage of Poland by most international media is: this time based on an out of context misreading of Tusk’s remark on nuclear & a misunderstanding of his comments on military training. 🫠

I've heard anecdotally that the US Embassy in Paris is attempting to make similar demands of its partners/suppliers. Which sounds like it might be tricky in a country where Equality is literally the second word of the national motto? #LibertéEgalitéFraternité

'Not one step back': Spain responds to Trump's anti-diversity demands

Several Spanish ministers have voiced their opposition to the news that the US embassy in Madrid is demanding that its Spanish suppliers prove they don't have DEI policies.

thelocal.es

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Watching Mello with my husband - here come the quotes : She's still singing and I've already forgotten it. This is awful. (It went direct to the final) Are the frame accurate cuts meant to distract from the Pringles on his jacket?

📌URGENT: The Associated Press is one of the foremost news operations in the world. Without it, most media entities could not survive. 📌Well, the AP has now been barred from the White House. I'd suggest very strongly that any media that gets its news from AP takes a damn stand here in solidarity.

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My favourite fact about Iceland is that we have many, many crime writers but only one forensic pathologist, and he was so busy answering all of their questions that he decided to have a small seminar for writers to get some peace. It immediately sold out so he had another one that also sold out.

Meta says it's still rolling out changes to loosen content moderation—but it already updated its Hateful Conduct policy with big changes. For example...it explicitly allows calling someone mentally ill for being gay or trans now www.wired.com/story/meta-i...

Meta Now Lets Users Say Gay and Trans People Have 'Mental Illness'

Meta rolled out a number of changes to its “Hateful Conduct” policy Tuesday as part of a sweeping overhaul of its approach toward content moderation.

wired.com

Dudley Simpson wrote the Blakes 7 theme tune in 1978. In the years running up to it, elements of the theme cropped up in everything from Eurovision to a Japanese light entertainment show. Was this just coincidence or were all 'borrowing' from an already established piece of music?

The details slowly emerging about the main suspect in the horrific Magdeburg attack contradict so much of what was posted online in the immediate aftermath. This is why it's always wise to wait for the facts before rushing to post unverified information about these atrocities.

Netflix UK has two old ITV dramas in its top four most-watched shows. Quite often there's a random Channel 5 doc called something like 'Behind the scenes at Christmas in Stoke-on-Trent' in the most-watched. I love how the British public just WANT terrestrial TV they don't know where to find it.

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