ITV1 ident package 2004/06

Guess they could have worked had they formed with the linear logo as the previous generic idents did, but the logo would have been less dominant on screen. Also at this point they were somewhat wanting to emphasise the "1" as much as the "ITV" anyway to ensure people realised there was a "2" and a "3".

P.S. A clean version of the brilliant Christmas ident from the year before is here.

When they introduced these ITV1 idents, they didn't have to do much to modify ITV2's presentation to use the stacked logo design, since they weren't using the full logo on most of their pres at the time. The only time I think it was seen was on the ECP or the breakdown slide.


from The Ident Gallery

I wonder what made ITV use blocks like the BBC?

I remember that, as mentioned they did use it very briefly. In 2004-06 ITV Sport was a bit all over the place, just after they lost the Premier League rights, when they were buying up everything that wasn't nailed down (the Boat Race, the Super Bowl), and they were changing things around quite frequently. I remember at the start of the 2004/05 season the DOG, on things like The Championship, started saying "ITV Football" rather than ITV Sport, and then after a few months they changed it back to ITV Sport again. Then when ITV changed their logo in January 2006, ITV Sport added the new logo to the graphics but otherwise kept them the same, until they had their own rebrand at the start of the World Cup.

It was quite an odd period for ITV Sport, clearly the loss of the Premier League hit them quite hard, and they were trying to find a new direction - as can be illustrated by Gabby Logan, who was the main presenter in 2004/05 but marginalised quite a bit in 2005/06 (this was the period when she'd be in the studio alone on a Champions League match and Andy Townsend and Ally McCoist would be pitchside, and all Gabby basically did was introduce them and they'd do most of the rest of it themselves) and then in the 2006 World Cup they parachuted Steve Rider in above her (which was as much as a surprise to him as anyone, he joined to do the F1, was asked if he'd fancied doing a bit in the World Cup and then went to a meeting to discuss that and was amazed to be introduced as the number one presenter for the World Cup, which was news to him) and by the end of 2006 she'd gone. Those two years seemingly weren't very happy ones for ITV Sport, hence the endless tinkering.



Well, maybe, but as I say, they don't have anything to do with the regular idents, they're just an image with the ITV logo slapped on them.

Don't recall them having the Superbowl at all - did they stick it out for all three years?

Yes, making it one of the only sporting events to have appeared on all five terrestrial channels, plus Sky as well.

Gabby presented it in the first year, and I remember Martin Johnson, the rugby player, being part of the studio team as he was a huge NFL fan. I can't remember who presented it after Gabby left, but they did show it until the Beeb took over the rights.

That's a good fact there.

Not many other events I can think of that have aired on all five. I know there has been a UEFA Cup semi-final on all five - C4 showed one in 1998 as part of their build-up to the World Cup - and I want to say the NBA Finals has also been on them all, but I can't remember ITV showing it at any point.

It feels odd that The Boat Race ended up on ITV - it feels like something so uniquely British that the BBC almost has to broadcast it. This was also during the period where ITV were very celeb-heavy, so broadcasting a sport as niche (in relative terms) as rowing felt like a off-brand move.

ITV2 receiving a rebrand in 2003 was intended to portray them as, well, ITV2 - 'the flip-side' to ITV1. Hence why the ITV2 logo had the same colours as the ITV1 logo, only in inverse order. Nowadays, of course, with the likes of the support shows to talent contests gone, ITV2 is pretty much it's own station, with enough big-hitting programmes (well, one) to stand alone.

In a way, it's the lost era of ITV1's pres, because it wasn't an absolutely terrible idea and concept that would inevitably go nowhere (cf. their replacement), but they were a bit too bland to be any good. It didn't help that this was a particularly dreadful period for ITV, where a lot of shows that were commissioned were either terrible, smashed in the ratings, too reliant on the same few people and usually all of the above. ITV Day was a bad idea right from the off, because they essentially threw away any brand equity they may have had for an instantly forgettable name, linking programmes that were instantly forgettable to begin with.

I think it was a case of the organization that own The Boat Race went for a more advertising agressive approach to bring in more money, and the BBC were outbid.
Presumably free of the BBC constraints on advertising, ITV offered more mentions of the sponsor and get the logo on screen more often, plus a fresher feel to the pre/post race coverage and more in race graphics coverage.

Like most 2nd/3rd tier sports - ITV got bored with it, and in soon came back the to the Beeb.

Yes, the NBA has also been on all five channels. The Beeb showed it in the late eighties, in weekly shows on Saturday nights - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1987-05-02#at-22.30 (they often say that football was such a state at the time that the Beeb showed the NBA rather than Match of the Day, though it actually wasn't during the football season) - and then those programmes were repeated on BBC2 over Christmas. C4 had the rights for a few years in the mid-nineties, and then ITV had the rights, and they did a show on Saturday afternoons called NBA 99/2000/2001 with extended coverage on ITV2. Then when they didn't renew the rights, it went to Channel 5 - I think at that point they had the full set of the US sports, they certainly had the NFL and MLB, and I think the NHL as well.

As you say, C4 showed a UEFA Cup match. This was part of Planet Football, in the build-up to the 1998 World Cup, where each week Steve Cram and Simon O'Brien would look at the football culture in a different country, and alongside the series they showed a few live matches - that, plus the African Nations Cup Final and PSV vs Feyenoord in the Dutch league. But the series was a flop, being dumped from 6pm to a late night slot during the run, and that was the end of that.



As you say, at the time I remember it being mentioned that one of the reasons the Beeb lost the rights was because the organisers wanted to go in a different, massively more commercial direction. As ever, this was greeted by the press as another nail in the coffin for BBC Sport, the same people who had previously, and then did again when they got the rights back, turned their nose up at the Beeb showing it because it wasn't a big enough event.

ITV Sport has been very inconsistent over the years, as to whether they want to cover many sports like the Beeb, or just concentrate on a couple of key sports. In the mid-nineties, for a while it was pretty much just football and F1 all the way (plus the rugby every four years), but when ITV2 started they were in the market for more sports, and got back into boxing and snooker in a big way, and even did a BDO vs PDC darts tournament one year. But then when the ITV Sport Channel went pop, they didn't need all this content and so most of them were quietly dropped and it was football and F1 all the way again for a few years. And then when ITV4 began they were interested again, and now we have lots of snooker and darts filling hours of that channnel.



Yes, I would suggest it was 2006, the early days of the next logo, that were the real dog days for ITV, Simon Shaps was a terrible controller and the summer of 2006 was a disaster, shows were being dropped mid-run left, right and centre, they were relying on ancient repeats to fill gaps (Rising Damp at teatime, Poirot episodes over ten years old at 9pm), the scheduling was all over the shop (with Emmerdale at 10pm for a month which was ludicrous*) and they were doing things like dropping CITV with seemingly no idea of what to put in its place and poaching the Saturday Kitchen team who flopped, and "forgetting" to review Paul O'Grady's contract. They even lost money on the World Cup, and indeed if anything sums up the channel at the time it's the fact they changed their main presenter halfway through the World Cup. A mess of a channel.

* The idea of putting Emmerdale on at a regular slot where it wouldn't get in the way of the World Cup was probably a sensible one, but 10pm was a ridiculous slot. You might be able to get away with it for Corrie, but not Emmerdale, it has a more mature audience and half of them would have been in bed by then.

Sorry, Emmerdale at 10pm? That is bonkers.

I understand that they wanted to move it out the way because of the World Cup, but to air a new episode at ten in the evening?

Like you've mentioned, some viewers might let it fly by if it was Corrie, but Emmerdale?

This was the first year where I saw an ad-break without any ads - just promos. It was in the middle of Prehistoric Park. From what I can find on The Guardian, the premier got 3.3mil, so the ratings must have dropped off a cliff considering how heavily it was promoted. It even had one of the few special idents of the short-lived original set.


I always thought that ITV created Primeval because they already had the dinosaur assets. Impossible Pictures' production history confirms it in my mind.

The rationale for putting Emmerdale out at 10:00pm was because they wanted to give the ITV Evening News a permanent slot throughout the World Cup, and it was allocated the 7:00pm slot. The regional news however was given one of two slots, either 4:00pm or 6:30pm, depending if there was a match on. I get the reason for a permanent schedule throughout a World Cup, but having Emmerdale on at 10:00pm was ludicrous. Needless to say they didn’t do it again after that.