In case you didn’t know, The BBC’s News At Ten is basically the UK’s main news programme (sorry to ITV).
It’s presented by a man called Huw Edwards, which makes him basically the UK’s main news person. He’s the guy the BBC parachutes in whenever there’s a major news story. When the Queen died, he was on air for about a million hours.
One day, a few years ago, I noticed something very unusual about Huw Edwards: He always started The New At Ten in exactly the same pose.
Obviously, this had to be turned into a Twitter account. So along with my colleague Matt Hewitt I started @HuwsAtTen.
Every day, we posted a screenshot of Huw doing exactly the same pose at the start of the news, and every day we’d get a handful of followers having a laugh in the comments section.
Then one of those followers sent the account to a journalist, and we ended up on pretty much every news website in the country.
We then made the news again when Huw deliberately changed his pose to send the internet into meltdown, and that Christmas we awarded a money-can’t-buy @HuwsAtTen calendar to the person who could best recreate the iconic Huw Edwards pose.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end. Earlier this year the BBC changed the layout of their news studio, meaning that Huw now starts the news standing up.
Matt and I made the difficult decision to bring @HuwsAtTen to an end, but we’ve left the account active so we can look back on many happy years of viral screenshotting.
Besides, you never know when The BBC might decide to invest in a new table…