The ITN Nostalgia Thread

I used to watch it over BBC and Sky. I always felt it had stronger presenters who carried it despite obviously less of a budget.

They were pretty bad for tinkering though - that horrible red ticker for a start. Some of their ambition-not-quite-matched-by-budget didn’t quite work on screen in some instances. The theatre of news worked in a better-resourced ITV1 bulletin but maybe wasn’t quite right for the channel. Always thought they should have gone for real screens over VR - maybe the technology wasn’t quite there at the time though.

And who can forget the ITN-branded era of the News Channel? That took simplicity to the max, and then some! It's really hard to fault it, though. Presentation-wise I think it was some of the best branding ever seen or heard on a 24-hour news channel before or since. It was just so clean, modern and stylish at the time and still to this day really. I don't think it's aged a bit.



Incidentally, I wondered at the time how they managed all the different versions of the opening titles with different presenter voiceovers. On ITV News the voiceovers were played in manually over the music from the Instant Replay machine but I always thought that seemed unlikely for the News Channel given the scope for error. I found out years later that the PCR4 Instant Replay had multiple versions of the title music with the voiceovers pre-mixed in. The vision mixer would play the titles and would send some kind of signal to the Instant Replay machine to trigger a pre-selected file. However, the sound mixer had to make sure he/she had selected the correct version on the Instant Replay otherwise the vision mixer would play the wrong track! Apparently that sort of thing was quite novel at the time whereas these days it's commonplace.

I remember a lot of the pre-switchover RSL local TV stations used to used to run ITN News Channel bulletins. It almost looked like they were specially commissioned network news programmes carrying the ITN branding.

A shame the Big Ben titles in the mid-90s were relatively short lived. One of Lambie-Nairn's finest works.

Although if it hadn't have gone then I bet it wouldn't have survived the cuts that happened around the financial crash of 2008 when the regions were reduced, studios closed etc.

Today they'd also have to face the fact that the BBC News Channel is simulcast on BBC One or BBC Two all over the place, even outside of Covid19, so they'd barely get a foothold into the market even now.

I seriously believe they just wanted the extra slot on Freeview and weren’t ever interested in expanding their news coverage.

I use to like the regional roundup thing they did on the Itv News Channel just after the lunchtime news, I also would switch on the Itv news channel before sky or BBC back in the day.

Yup. This is the one I was thinking of. If I’m not mistaken, he later hands over to John Suchet in a brown broom cupboard. (The same one where Suchet went open ended for six hours at the start of the conflict). And where he famously collapses on the desk (off camera) when they eventually handed over to the Morning News, I think.

I always really liked that cantilever desk that was made to look like it was hanging from the (fake) pillar. Really simple and elegant design.

A little bit more contrast and less white in the rest of that set and it would probably have been fantastic.

It was a nice set, but they ruined it when they added a cheap orange gradient to the background (and graphics), presumably in a misguided attempt to make it look warmer.

Reminds me of the weird daytime variant of the 1999 ITV generic ident, which was the same but just with more brown.

I always assumed the orange gradient was added to make it look similar to ITV News. Like with many things like this, the very first look of the channel was the best - presumably created by an agency with the following tweaks being done in-house.