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Welcome to primetime on American broadcast TV. Accelerated Flow.

OMG Words can not describe this

Alright, there's a chance that nobody is going to care about this but me. But it's been on my mind every time I come across this clip.

The titles for Clarkson's chat show in the late 90s. The show is in widescreen but look at the titles - it looks suspiciously to me like the titles were originally 4:3, which have been zoomed/cropped to 14:9 and then they've added artificial borders to fit in with the graphics used on the title sequence itself. (So when it appeared on analogue like this you're not missing anything).

The show was widescreen from the start so they would have been like that from the first episode. I'm wondering if the titles were produced in 4:3 (as this was 1998) before they knew the show was going to be shot in widescreen, so they were forced to modify the titles for 16:9 and this was the easiest option.

Or I'm just way overthinking this and that's how they wanted them to look like.


(Titles at 1:42)

I'm well aware of Accelerated Flow - Trying to find clips of the original credits from shows ruined by it on YT can be challenging. I meant more in the way House Party did it - Credits, cut to actor/host, trail, cut back, start show.

Surely they could have just made them 14:9 safe from the start?

It's a good way to do it, reminds me of some US channels which would do similar with their 4:3 and HD outlets

Looks to me like a design choice rather than a 4:3 rescue job. When 16:9 started you were still designing mainly for 4:3 viewers - so making sure it worked in 14:9 letterbox was definitely your primary task, with the tiny number of 16:9 digital viewers effectively more of an afterthought.

Though when it comes to the TOTP repeats on BBC4, even the "passing mentions" of the banned presenters (DLT, Savile, King and Smith) get removed- however sloppy the edit.

Indeed - the only thing that really makes me wonder if it's cropped is the full screen bits of Clarkson waving his arms about (particularly near the end of the sequence) - if that was 16:9 surely it'd just fill up the whole frame and wouldn't need pillarboxing. Though again they may have just done this to fit in with the rest of the titles.

Interesting Noel reads out an 0891 number over the Superman credits and there's no mention of how much the calls cost. Wouldn't get away with that nowadays.

I wonder why there never brought back the panel game for later series, it work very well.

Random presentation point but I seem to remember the countdown clock on Grab a Grand and what not seemed to be like a corporate standard because when they appeared on other BBC programmes of the time (ie Generation Game just after the conveyor belt), it was (save for the colour sometimes) presented in the exact same style and on-screen position on every programme that used them, and IIRC this went on for quite some time in the early 90s.

Just an aside, but I do remember catching a few minutes of that Clarkson series in which he was talking about how the programme was made in widescreen, and if you didn't have a widescreen TV, you'd miss out on the bits of the programme at the left and right hand sides of the screen. This was followed by laughter from the audience who presumably could see something outside the 14:9 safe area that those of us without digital TV at the time couldn't. I've still no idea what it was - probably something xenophobic or sexist.