TV Whirl - Happy 9th Birthday

Yes, TV Whirl is still going after over 8 years, I just haven't been really doing much by way of mentioning the fact (promotion isn't high on my list of priorities ). Still, as it seems that when you don't give a constant update of what's going on, people tend to write you off, I thought I'd best give a bit of an update on what's been going on with the site...

Since 2006, work has been ongoing with a massive overhaul to the site, hence why I've not been rushing in with as many updates. That said, work on the site as it is hasn't stopped. Like Derren Brown, I mostly focus on occasional events, and try and give them a bit more of an interesting angle, with the usual tedious packages of every channel being saved for the big relaunch (lets face it, they generally aren't going anywhere in the meantime ). Throughout 2009 there's been random weekends covering the Dave Lister channel (shown for the Red Dwarf Back to Earth specials earlier in the year) and the switchover of Digital in the North West, among other things. We also had a brief facelift in December, just to keep things fresh (and no doubt annoy people using IE6! ).

Today, sees the annual TV Whirl Christmas Box to round off the year. Basically, it's a random roundup of clips from around all the channels looking at where festive presentation has popped up. There's not too much focus on network BBC One and Two, as every frame has already been covered from 13 different angles in plenty of other places, so I dont think you need to see it again. Instead some of the other channels like CBBC, CITV, S4C, Virgin1 and even E4 get a look in (yes, though Channel 4 didn't bother with their main channel, they did sneak the festive tweaks in on their sister station). 30 bits of random video, to celebrate a Merry Christmas 2009 on TV Whirl.

http://www.tvwhirl.co.uk

So what's to come for 2010? Well no doubt there'll be more random events popping up from time to time. As well as that, what I call odds and sods pop up frequently on the homepage, thus easy to find. Basically they're clips I capture which have no actual page or place (they're usually orphans, that were captured for use in scattered threads on this forum rather than specifically for the site ). Maybe even Revision 14, but I prefer to leave that one a mystery! At the very least, I'll at least keep you uptodate!

Oh, and just added an extra E4 Christmas Sting on there to take the box to 31, as I spotted another one popping up today! It looks nothing like the rest mind (somewhat sweeter and more magical), so I wonder if it's a later addition.



(It's also a buggar on video encoders!)

2010, and what better way to celebrate the dawn of a new year... than to look back at some old ones!

As I've always taken a look at a lot more than just pres on the site, I thought I'd have a change of pace, so a small new feature has been added for adverts (something which will continue to be expanded if anything else pops up throughout 2010!). Taking a look back at some of the ads to pop up over the past year which we last saw in the 80s, it's the Comeback Collection (complete with predictable Rocky music!).

There's Milky Way, Toys R Us, Lego... and Thinkbox (yes, not strictly an old ad, but if you've seen it you'll know why I've chucked it in there ) so far. Who knows which brand will try and prove their age by raiding the archives next.


Comeback Ads Collection 2009

(And if you like that, I'd also suggest taking a peek at the Channel 4 @ 25 event from a few years back if you missed it, as it also has all the old adverts companies brought out for the special 25th birthday breaks.)

Good work. I always have a look at your site periodically - nice to see the updates.

Another (admittedly fairly unplanned ) update to the site today, and one which actually sees some new things on a standard page of the site rather than an 'event' somewhere. As there's been a lot of discussion from folks over some of the ITV regions overnight going on in the main forum and I just happened to be going through tapes full of Night-based-goodness recently, I added a few extra clips from the Granada service fed out in the North East, Yorkshire's branded Night Shift service, and the ever popular among the jobless folks sitting up at 5am Jobfinder from the Channel 3 NE era!


ITV Night Time

(Bonus points for spotting the bit I put into one of the clips as I was bored!)

Continuing with updates to that Nighttime page (you can tell I'm going through a lot of tapes containing Night Time material on at the moment; see, if VCR timers had been easy to work, we'd have lost a tonne of archive material!), there's 3 more clips been added this evening.

All from 1992, there's a slightly more upbeat holding slide, an amazingly well scheduled menu slide just in case you wanted to know everything you've just missed, and finally a short snippet from Granada/Oracle Jobfinder... for those not able to afford TVs with teletext in 1992.


ITV Night Time (from a Tyne Tees POV)

Feeling a little inspired by that Jobfinder clip, this weekend I've gone away from Night time, and back to more of a marking event page. The end of 2009, as everyone knows, saw pretty much the end of the Teletext commercial service. What with Ceefax disappearing as regions go through digital switchover over the next few years, the UK WST-style text is largely at an end.

In celebration of nearly 40 years of a service that the public grew to love, we've a page dedicated to some clips of In Vision snippets over the years. Yes, prepare to marvel once more as the Animated Dude from 4-Tel on View returns with a vengeance...



Teletext In View


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On an unrelated note, does anyone these days have any bother using the popup menu navigation on the website? Traditionally this has been done by Javascript, however with IE6 being so on the wane now (and with workarounds to 'fix' its hover behaviour anyway), I can replace this with a modern entirely CSS/HTML based menu, as most sensible sites use. This does take an awful lot of time though as there's so many links to rewrite as well as adding a lot to the html of all the pages, so I thought I'd best throw it out there to find out if anyone actually still struggles with the JS menu (if not, I might just hold off the nicer menu for the rebuild).

Motion carried on the menu then...

Only a small update, barely worth mentioning, but there's a nice clip surfaced on the back of it. Namely the promo to the first ever series of Who Wants to be a Millionaire in 1998 (from what I can remember). That show will never take off! It can be found by going to the homepage, along with a few other clips from 1998.

Basically, this a bit of a tech experiment more than anything, as I've finally got some equipment which can recover a whole bunch more stuff I have on tape from 1998 to 2000, which was hitherto inaccessible due to the VHS machine of that era being as shoddy as hell. Expect there to be more to come from this as I revisit the archives (preferably before the rest of them mould away )

There wasn't due to be an update in this thread until next week, however I'd like to clarify one thing quickly. TV Whirl has not been hacked, despite what Asa's script may currently be saying.

"Hacked by BongHitz"? I'm guessing the feed that supplies the ticker has been hacked. I'll post this in the thread for TVF.

Oops, sorry about that. It looks like t|v|a's hacked page description was being picked up for TV Whirl's description, which doesn't extract any content from the page for showing in the ticker. Should be ok now.

Sorry guys, argh! I'm running out of ideas! Revert to html 1.0!