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.
Ident City 