What was your favorite regional ITV station growing up?

This one?

https://youtu.be/YclB-1DtYfU

These are *much* more advanced than anything on UK TV at the time of course. We would probably have considered most of this vulgar...

Similar sort of thing but not that company. The comoamy/technique I was thinking of had at least one British example, and that got a mention on the Wikipedia page about it.


Those Sullivan and Marks examples are great though and yes would definitely have been considered too brash and American fir the UK. Although when that sort of thing did arrive here with Sky turns out they were!

Aha, what I was thinking of was Scanimate, which was an analog computer animation system invented by the Computer Image Corporation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanimate

It did do one British ident, not Tyne Tees but the 1982 TSW one!

This was the video I was looking for, an compilation of the best 15 Scanimate logos, and TSW is included:

Interesting that the compiler of that video thinks TSW is the best thing they ever did. Not sure I agree to be honest... I got the impression that the final few frames were done in a hurry, which is backed up by the fact that when the station first opened they faded the ident to a still of their logo.

I have always liked this pre CGI look that came out of America. I don't care if it was brash, it made the UK stuff in the main look stuffy and old fashioned.

Which can be seen from 1:20 below:

Possibly either the whole ident was done using partly that technique and partially another, or they did the two seperately and they didn't quite match up when they were edited together. Always looked a bit of a bodge

I wonder why they didn't just keep using that fade as shown on the opening show, it looks a lot cleaner.

Mini-conspiracy theory time: perhaps they bought the main part of the ident "off-the-shelf" from the expensive US agency, and then paid someone far cheaper to edit the thing into the TSW ident (maybe in-house?). I shouldn't think TSW had a great deal of money to be splashing around on this sort of thing during 1981. The much larger TVS's initial ident was a much less ambitious affair, even if it was done with a lot of polish for the time.

That said it seems that even the tiny local stations in the USA were spending far more on branding and graphics than we were at this time. Look at some of their reels, then compare with say YTV, going from one static ident with jingle, to a very slightly different static ident with a variant of the same jingle, in 1982. Must have cost them all of £500 to commission . YTV (and TSW to be honest) we're far larger companies than some of these local affiliates in the US, with far less competition as well.

At the 1982 franchise renewals, did anyone who kept their franchise, actually change their logo? Obviously Yorkshire tweaked their still image, that was their ident, but what about anyone else?

The lack of competition is one reason why they probably didn't feel as much need to spend megabucks on visual branding for the franchises. The more competitive the market, the more you need to stand out, the more you need to spend to stand out etc.

In 1981 there was no commercial TV competition in each ITV franchise area (C4 didn't exist - and until 1992 advertising revenue for C4 returned to the local ITV company) - it was literally a licence to print money... In the US most areas will have had at least three fully commercial stations competing with each other (affiliates to ABC, NBC and CBS plus other less affiliated stations?)

Wasn't Channel's stripy CTV logo introduced around that time?

FOX didn't arrive until 1986. There were several independent stations, many of which were ex-affiliates of the failed DuMont network, as well as a few Christian stations in larger markets.