BBC West Midlands schedule - and "Midlands Today" in 1964, one of the UK's first daily regional news programmes. Regional television had been established in 1957 with the launch of local evening news bulletins. Although it fared better than the struggling BBC North or BBC West (which was threatened for a while with being absorbed by the Midlands Region), it was clear that if BBC Midlands was too large to be truly local in the radio market, it was equally too small to be as self-sufficient across the full range of television programming as it had been in radio. The result was the
BBC South West networked programming between 7pm and closedown at 1am. Weekend evening programmes are also simulcast with stations in the BBC West region. "BBC South West" also produces regional news & local radio pages for BBC Red Button and "BBC Local" websites for each county. BBC South West began a regional television service on 20 April 1961 (nine days before the first broadcast of the rival ITV station, Westward Television) with ten-minute news bulletins on weekdays, originally presented by Tom Salmon. A year later, the bulletin was expanded and relaunched as the news magazine programme "South West at Six" (hosted by Sheila