For those who have never heard of BBC Select, let me briefly introduce you to the service, as it was.

BBC Select was a service that broadcast on the downtime of BBC1 and BBC2, usually between about 2am and 6am.  Programmes were very specialist and usually only available by subscribing to them.  An occasional free to air programme did occur, mainly towards the end of the service.

BBC Select began in January 1992.  The programmes may have been scrambled but the bits between them certainly were not.  You’d have this rolling identity with the station theme that carried on for about 6 minutes a time, then just before the programme began, you’d go to the ident, which faded out, and then the scrambling began, and the programme started.

The service ended in 1994 through lack of use.  This all happened prior to the launch of BBC News 24, which didn’t happen until 1997.  After BBC Select finished, BBC came up with the BBC Learning Zone for overnights on BBC2.

It has to be said that the logo is very simple, just a gold ring.  It actually comes from the gold ring of communication that circles the globe on the BBC’s crest of arms.

Here’s the video of the signature theme to BBC Select, the one that aired repeatedly in a 6 minute loop.

I used to love that music.  Sounded almost like a very extended fanfare.  Reminiscent as well of the startups of old that used to occur on both BBC1 and ITV.

More later here on Ident City.  Stay tuned!

BBC Parliament, the BBC’s channel for continuing coverage of parliament and the various assemblies across the country, got a new look at 2.30pm on Monday 20th April 2009.  Two videos to bring you, one showing the end of the old look and the first highlights of the new look, and the second shows the first five minutes or so of the new look unedited.

There’s more to come here on Ident City, so stay tuned.

This happened live on air, on the BBC News Channel, leading up to the simulcast BBC News at Ten.  Because Children In Need on BBC1 was overrunning, the whole countdown was played, even the whole 30 seconds of hold at the end of the countdown, which is not usually seen at all.

Stay tuned.  More to come from Ident City

A little journey through the day on TVNZ’s TV One.  First off, Breakfast.

Breakfast runs from 6.30am to 9am.  Next, One News at Midday, and from here on in, all the opens will look very similar.

Next, One News First at 4:30.  4:30pm seems to be quite a popular time for a bulletin in Australia and New Zealand, but less so in the US, Canada and Europe.

Just an hour after that bulletin finishes, the main evening news programme airs.  One News at 6.

At about 8.30pm there is a quick One News Update, and this is what it looks like.

Finally, at some time around 11pm, though this varies, here’s One News Tonight.

The One News bulletins at 12pm, 4.30pm and 6pm, plus the TVNZ 7 News at 8pm are streamed live online at www.onenews.co.nz.

TVNZ 7 has a special hour long 8pm news programme.  It’s bascially an updated version of TVNZ’s One News at 6pm.  I’ll dig out the current One News open, for my next post so you can see how similar they are.  But here’s TVNZ News at 8pm.

TVNZ has it’s own news channel of sorts.  It’s called TVNZ 7, and it’s commercial free.

Here’s how the channel works.  From 6am to 9am, 3 hours of rolling news.  The rest of the day’s schedule is made up of 10 minute news bulletins, called TVNZ News Now, and documentaries and information programming for the rest of the hour.  The exception is at 8pm when you have an hour long “TVNZ News at 8″.  From midnight to 6am, TVNZ runs an “overnight information service”, which I must assume to be text based information.

Anyway, here’s a little sample of how the channel looks.

I notice they’ve borrowed the BBC News idea of a countdown to the top of the hour.  Looks quite good.  Shame there’s no facility to watch the channel or at least the bulletins online.

Stay tuned for more after the break.

TNVZ is perhaps one of the most recent state-owned broadcasters in the world.  Although it originally launched in 1980 after the merger of Television One and TV2 and being paired alongside Radio New Zealand as part of the BCNZ, TVNZ wouldn’t appear on it’s own until 1988, after it had been separated from RNZ.

As such TVNZ doesn’t have the depth of history that some other broadcasters have.  But from 2005, here’s an ident for TVNZ One, and the opener to One News Tonight.

Looking for more TVNZ out there, as I go, and hopefully, I’ll have some more for you shortly.  Stay tuned!

It can be amazing what you find on the internet sometimes.  I was looking for some more Headline News material, and discovered this.  It’s about 7.5 minutes long and might seem a bit boring at first as the disembodied voice explains how you create multilayered graphics, but stick with it.  At about 4 minutes 30 seconds in he starts showing you some real world work he’d done, and not long after that, you realise that this guy designed the segment opens for CNN Headline News.  The opens date from 1989 so it’s fascinating to see these without any anchors interrupting them.

I promise you, I’ll keep looking for some more great stuff like this.

BBC News 24, or the BBC News Channel as it is now known, launched on Sunday 9th November 1997 at 5.30pm in the afternoon.  There was a half hour ‘preface’ before the first bulletin, and before the preface, the very first BBC News 24 countdown…

Stay tuned for more from BBC News 24/BBC News Channel shortly here on Ident City.

Few idents make an impact on me such that I can perfectly recall them years later without the aid of any video, but this extended ident for the original UK incarnation of Bravo, is one of those.  Very regal, visually stunning and reminiscent of several classic idents from the past.

A little extra information for you.  This ident aired twice a day on Bravo.  It was the first thing seen at startup at midday, and the last thing seen at closedown at midnight.

One of my all time favourites and I’m pleased to be able to present it here.

There are channels that come and go, and there are channels that stay.  Some of the better ones that disappear do manage to leave an impression that remains long after they’ve gone, and ABC1 is one of those channels.

Stay tuned.  More on the way shortly here at Ident City.

Here’s something that will be familiar to those of us in the UK in a sense, even though it’s from the US.  Specifically, it’s from CBS owned station WCBS TV in New York City.

In the UK, we call them closedowns, where the US use the term sign off.  But this blog won’t be signing off any time soon.  We’ll have more for you shortly.

This is a title sequence that I remember well.  When CNN International showed Headline News bulletins in the second half of some hours, this was the title sequence they used and the music.

I liked Headline News back then, a half hour of news, business and sport, every half hour, non-stop, around the clock.  That might sound boring to some, but its perfect for me.  I can choose to pick up the news when I want to, not when the schedulers say I should.  24-hour cable news in the US has lost that ability, by becoming appointment to view television.  That’s a shame.

This is a bit of guesswork on my part as to the dates, if you know more, please do not hesitate to leave a comment telling me and I’ll alter it on here, but based on the very minimal amount of research that I have been able to find on the web about this, I would estimate that this startup aired from around 1979 to 1985.  Certainly the music has that 70s sound about it and the startup certainly does seem to be somewhat 70s in nature.  It’s also definitely on film, thanks to all the scratches and fluff that seem to be on the picture.

I’m doing a fair bit of hunting for other European countries presentation as well as a lot of UK, Ireland, Australia, US and Canada stuff.  Stay tuned for more.

In Australia, SBS has recently relaunched with a new look and a new tagline, “Six Billion Stories and counting”.  Not surprisingly, the new idents involve that whole idea of individual stories.  Here’s one of them…

I can’t say I am a fan of this particular style, but I do think SBS have actually done a good job here.  Stay tuned for more after the break!

A real treat for you here, the launch of a channel. This is the debut of the Fox Business Network on Monday 15th October 2007. It was seen on only a few cable systems and on satellite in the US.

More to come soon. Stay tuned to this channel!

Here’s another classic ident for your perusal.  This time it’s a classic from the US, as we bring you the NBC peacock, in living colour, from the 1960s.

Much more to come over the days, weeks and months to come.  Stay tuned to this station!

I haven’t done any Canadian television yet, so here are two idents for the price of one. The first ident in the clip is a network ident, whilst the second one is a local ident for the local relay.

More CBC and other Canadian channels in the near future. Stay tuned!

The second of my posts about the new look BBC News for 2008, takes us back about a half hour before the previous post, when the channel relaunched after the Breakfast simulcast at around 8.30 am.

More to come ater this meassage, and a word from your local station!

After a few days, the new BBC News Channel has settled in and we can now start bringing you the video clips of the new look.  First, the new look Top Of The Hour sequence, as first seen at about 9am on Monday 21st April 2008.

More coming up shortly, stay tuned!

With the new look to BBC News 24 just a couple of days away, including a rebrand to BBC News Channel, I thought it would be a good idea to fill out our BBC News 24 section a bit, so you can see how the channel has changed over the years. Recently, I posted the whole 90 second countdown from the 1999-2003 era of News 24. Now, I post an entire TOTH from recent times. This one was a bit different from normal in the sense that we got the spinning background for a moment before the countdown to the TOTH began. Your anchors for this hour are Louise Minchin and Tim Willcox.

More to come on the history of BBC News 24 shortly, and I hope to have some video from the new look added soon too. Stay tuned.

This is how British Satellite Broadcasting’s Galaxy channel used to open up their transmissions. This is from November 30th 1990.

Quite a good identity for a channel that only lasted less than a year.

The video I’m presenting here is BBC World’s output, but from an unsual day. It had been around 6pm when power got cut off to BBC Television Centre and the area around Shepherd’s Bush where TV Centre is located.

Now, there are standby generators that are used to keep channels on air, which cut as soon as a loss of power is detected. However, the power they provide is not enough to do much more than keep the gallerys and offices running. Certainly it does not provide the power necessary for studio operations. So, BBC News 24, BBC World and BBC Television News was decamped to Westminster where the power was still flowing nicely. For about a day and a bit, a combined BBC News service went out 24/7 on both BBC News 24 and BBC World, with both BBC1 and BBC2 dipping in at certain times. In fact, I remember that instead of a political programme at Midnight on BBC2, they took a news bulletin from the combined BBC News 24/BBC World service.

Here’s the video.

You will notice that the 10 second countdown is followed by an almost 1 minute long BBC World ident, before the news programme begins. The voice on the ident is Adrian Finighan, who these days can be seen anchoring CNN bulletins.

This has gotta be one of my all-time favourite pieces of presentation. The classic BBC News 24 90 second countdown to the top of the hour, from 1999. It managed to air in its entirity just once, on BBC1 just before they joined BBC News 24 to fill in the overnight hours. On that occasion, they managed to plan it so that they joined the channel at the top of the hour, hence the use of the full countdown.

One of the all time greats, and I’m so glad I’m able to present it here.

Time for an ident from the other side of the big pond, and NBC are about to show an episode of “Viper” when this comes on screen.

Spooky, dark, mysterious, I love it.

Posted here below is a video combining ten current idents from RTE One, Ireland’s main channel. Best of all, no announcer to spoil things, so you can hear the music.

It was two years ago when as Mayor I decided to closedown the original Ident City site, which was originally hosted by Geocities. I had been working on it part time since 1998, and with the fact that I was working most of the time, and the fact it took many hours work to encode each page and add the various files and links, I decided that I couldn’t do the site any favours by leaving it on site without adding new material on a regular basis. So I closed the site down and started a blog, with which I could experiment with.

The blog was called Viewpoint, and in those past two years, the blog has moved and grown from strength to strength. Now, I’m ready to return to Ident City, and once again, as mayor of this proud borough, let me welcome you back.

I aim to cover a lot more ground on this Ident City blog, than I ever could at the original site. Thanks to the developments in internet video, it’s possible for me to provide a much more content rich site than I could at the original.

To prove this, let me show you what gem I have discovered on You Tube. The video itself dates back to 1968, at around the time when ABC Weekend Television and Rediffusion London, through the instructions of the Independent Television Authority, were forming a joint operation as the new London Weekday franchisee, to be called Thames Television.

Thames would continue broadcasting to London until 1992. But the footage I present below, found on YouTube, is some original 405 line test footage of the early black and white version of what would become their best known and most loved identity. The London Skyline.

Listen out for the old ABC chimes in there, and towards the end of the video, a piece of music will come on that will be instantly familiar to anybody who watched any Thames Television output, anywhere in the world.

And this is what the final version looked like, in it’s original black and white glory!

It’s good to be back in Ident City.