TV Whirl - Celebrating 20 Purple Years

Almost ironically with our broadcasters dropping the technology, due to television sets being made to support multiple markets, most modern sets can probably render out the level 2 and higher standards (as well as being able to cache all pages in memory and have features like being able to navigate between subpages) better now than the equipment we had in the 90s and early 2000s.

These were grabbed from my hotel television in Germany just last year from ZDF. And show the switch up from (I think) level 1.5 to level 2.5 a few seconds later. Inkeeping with the election theme here spot the news headlines about the then still upcoming US Election.

You'd think the lower spec there would use a red logo on a white background, rather than white on blue...

Latest Updates - End of June 2017

TL;DR? Lots and lots of new stuff added to the site! - https://www.tvwhirl.co.uk

Presentation Updates
It's been a busy week on the site with a bumper update across all of the pres coverage for the main channels just to ensure coverage on more recent presentation in particular. Proof that with enough time and determination from just little old me, anything is possible.

In total just for pres since Monday 88 new videos have been added, and 766 new images , bringing coverage of BBC One, BBC Two, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 bang up to date, and adding some extras to archive pages. As well as new channel additions from Scotland in the form of STV and STV2.






Childrens
I certainly haven't forgotten about other areas of the site during all this however. There have been quite a few new additions to the Children's programme section too, including one in particular which seems a bit of a rarity online for anyone who remembers it. Retrace was a CITV drama produced by Yorkshire Television which ran for 2 series between 1996 and 1998. Despite winning an RTS award at the time, barely any trace of it (pun not intended) apart from an IMDB page seems to have surfaced online... until now!

https://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/programmes/childrens/




Teletext
Still keeping with the children's theme, the Teletext section has seen a new addition too from a more niche channel this time. The Disney Channel's Text service from December 1997 has been added. A brilliant example of pixel artwork of some of everyone's most beloved Disney characters features, hitherto lost to the depths of time. And dating from so close to Christmas, it also includes the Disney Channel's Christmas Day schedule for that year.

https://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/teletext/other-teletext/

Glad to see TV Whirl up and running again! The Teletext section is giving it a unique feature in the pres site world.

Wow, that is a fantastic rendition of Simba, considering the technical limitations.

I love the Simba rendition. The Timon and Pumbaa one isn't bad either, somebody put a lot of time into those three characters!

Disney Channel back when it was a decent channel, mix of films, cartoons, TV shows old and new. Not just the same few live action sitcoms over and over as it is now.

Well back then it was more bankrolled by the parent company and was more family orientated than it is now. There's a schedule or two in the teletext pages on Whirl that shows the variety of shows on offer, things that used to be on ABC such as Home Improvement, The Wonder Years and Dinosaurs.

It wasn't just an endless wheel of imported sitcoms as it is now, I think Disney changed the direction of the channel and set up a specific production company around the turn of the century primarily to feed the American Disney Channel with all its sitcoms, films and what not and the UK arm eventually just became another mouthpiece for it. All the archive stuff was farmed off elsewhere.

There is a lot to say but I will cut it down. Back when the disney channel started in the 80s in the USA it really was a back end mouthpiece of its archive and thats it, it wasn't bankrolling anything. Around the same time a new management - michael eisner come along and started to invest in the Disney brand, this included new programming IE the cartoons but there weren't for its own channel there were for Syndication and it brought in the money etc Ducktales, chip n dale, Darkwing duck, Gargoyles, recess, etc

It wasn't until the late 90s the disney channel really started to have original made for content, and someone started to do the numbers on that type of cheap format IE Lizzie Mcguire. Then the channels started to change, Thus Disney channel become more female orientated. It's the reason why it started to get its claws into Jetix, to have Male orientated channel. Toon Disney was shut, and will the out let for anything from the Classic eras were gone. There money to be made from High School Musical,

UK channel had a small decent run from 95 - 05, but it was around the time the cost cutting come in Ie Studio disney was killed off it started to get meh. Its a shame ABC1 did close down on Freeview.

I'm glad everyone liked the Disney Channel text service. I do really enjoy finding and adding in the text services as there's just so much in them which hasn't been seen for years. It's just a shame it's also the bit that, due to the sheer amount of manual repair work involved, takes the longest to get online.

Still, I've gotten another of the less mainstream channels added in today as the Disney service looked a bit lonely on that page by itself. This time it's a text service from Sky Premier in 1998. Featuring shared content from across the whole of the Sky Text service, as well as some tailored pages specifically for the movie channels from Sky. Not as graphically rich as the Disney Channel was, but there's a few nice efforts in there such as one graphic designer's attempts to depict the Borg and the Enterprise from Star Trek due to the premier of Star Trek First Contact at that time. Also for those who want to remember Barry Norman who's recently passed away, this dates from shortly after his move from the BBC to Sky, so a few pages of reviews from the famous film critic are to be found.



https://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/teletext/other-teletext/

The teletext pages are hidden gems in all our recordings - and its only been fairly recently we've been able to extract those pages to a fairly decent standard and relatively quickly, compared to a few years ago. How fabulous.

Gremlin in the system? Looks like they repeated the Saturday schedule and then posted the real Sunday one (note the presence of A View to a Kill in there).