News At Ten, ITV 1

ITV’s very own, original, accept no substitutes News at Ten returned last night a little over 40 years after its debut and some three years after it had been killed off (for a second time).

It had been so heavily promoted through the day, with stills of its Big Ben logo topping and tailing commercial breaks, that it was amazing ITV viewers did not have clock faces for eyes by the time the bongs finally chimed. When they did, much was reassuringly familiar.

The title sequence, as in the 1980s, began in outer space, travelled down the Thames and ended up about to crash into the House of Parliament. A rumoured £250,000 had been spent on that alone, and the opening still looked like a cartoon.

The chimes rang out and there, sitting down, which has not been ITV style for a while, was Sir Trevor McDonald, accompanied by an attractive younger woman, in this case Julie Etchingham from Sky News, who turned out to have a better grasp about which camera to look at than the veteran newscaster tempted out of retirement for one final campaign, like a mercenary from The Wild Geese.

The fluorescent Thames backdrop was pretty amazing. The bulletin’s much touted exclusive, an interview in Pakistan with Princess Diana’s lover Hasnat Khan, was not.

Reporter Neil Connery did not even discover why they had broken up. With reporting from the Diana inquest, it took up the show’s first eight minutes. To make up, the next story was all sober speculation about the future of the struggling Northern Rock.

Visually, the biggest coup was a live interview from within a melting Antarctic glacier with ITV’s Bill Neely. It was a beautiful set piece. It was just a pity the reporter was keener to explain how he had got there than what was going on with global warming.

For anyone who ever got their news from Alastair and Selina, or Andrew or Reggie, it was ever so slightly thrilling to hear again the old pay-off “so-and-so, News at Ten, someplace”.

But on the arriviste BBC Ten O’Clock News, Huw Edwards was not taking his new competition lying down.

Indeed, he stood up to introduce a report from John Simpson, who had been smuggled into Zimbabwe, from where the BBC has been long banned.

Trevor will have taken away some of Huw’s viewers last night with a spirited comeback. When the big story breaks, I think I know to where they will return.

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