TV Whirl - Celebrating 20 Purple Years

Good spot there, as that's one that had completely slipped past me when I was uploading these. It's always a bit hard to be sure whether there's a genuine error, or whether it's just something that's come through as an error in the recovery, but checking some of the raw data that one does look like an error which may have crept in to the original listings.

When I've got some spare time, I shall have to run forward a bit on the recording (as I have about an hour and a half from the date - although not enough to get past ITV's airing of A View to a Kill) and see if it is corrected later. Given this was on Boxing Day, I'd imagine a lot of it the page generation would have been automated in advance with fewer checks than usual so it could be an interesting one to check.

Latest Updates - End of July/Start of August 2017

It's time for the semi-occasional update on new content on the site. It's a lot of work for one person - not something I ever shy away from, but it doesn't leave a lot of time to keep everyone updated on what's been happening so definitely worth keeping an eye on either the latest updates page or even that little 'latest update' feature on TV Forum gives some hints as to what I'm up to on a given day.

With June being the site's 'update all the major terrestrials' month, July has definitely been the month of moving on to some of the smaller ones.

Archive Updates
HTV has seen a batch of content from 2000 added in recent weeks, with badly-timed hearts idents, trailers and community links added in.



Main Terrestrial Updates
Further updates have been added in to the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 pages to cover events such as London Pride and the relaunch of Channel 5's Milkshake strand a few weeks ago.



Smaller Terrestrial Updates
The coverage of Dave has been massively added to. Now in addition to the coverage of the special Dave Lister presentation from 2009, there's coverage from both the original and current branding package, as well as some of the special bits Dave have put out over the years such as their Match of the Dave work from 2010 to compensate for not having any actual football rights during the World Cup.



Yesterday has also been added to expand the current UKTV History content that has been there since it originally launched on Freeview in 2002. This has also meant the rest of the UKTV coverage has been moved around to keep things consistent. Other channels which have seen updates in recent days are FTN, BBC Three (remember them?) and More4. And there is lots more to come as I clear a massive backlog that had managed to build up.




Non Presentation

Outside of the pres stuff as I try and remember everything on TV Whirl, the adverts section has seen quite a few new additions in recent weeks, with adverts from 1984 added to and some others recaptured in higher quality. And some new ones from Christmas 1996 added - relive Nicholas Lyndhurst playing every character possible for WH Smiths, the changeover from Access to Mastercard, or some store called Tandy.



Find out more on TV WHIRL - yes, name written in capital letters there for no apparent reason!
https://www.tvwhirl.co.uk

Happy Birthday ITV1 - 11/8/2001

For those who remember, it was this day 16 years ago when ITV first changed its name to ITV1 - or at least for a while. Although it was ultimately a somewhat lacklustre event, particularly for those of us in GMG North where we got their new horrid short lines re-edited ident most of the day, as a still young site the changeover of the brand was one of the first events TV Whirl live covered throughout that first day.



To mark the occasion 16 years on, have a small selection of the teletext pages that were being broadcast during the service that day. And if you thought that they didn't acknowledge too much of a change onscreen, there's absolutely no mention of it at all on the text service. Teletext Ltd continue to call it ITV at this point, whilst the Tyne Tees ancillary service... just continues using the 1998 logo, having already ignored both the original ITV generic look and their own 2000 rebrand completely.



View more - https://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/teletext/itv-teletext/#vid_10742

There were no end of services that took forever to update to the new ITV1 name. Some printed magazines and TV inserts in newspapers took a while to change and I dare say a handful never actually did which was handy a few years later when ITV backtracked on the ITV1 idea

I'm not sure how long it took Teletext to catch up with the ITV1 name changes, although I'm sure with more digging through footage I could narrow it down - it's possible they even did it at the same time as bringing in cross-promotion of the additional pages they gained when they took on the Channel 5 contract. Certainly though by the time of the celebrity rebrand the following year, Teletext Ltd were fully onboard with the rename. As for the ancillary service, despite all the national rebranding and moving of things to London that happened in the foreground, I suspect all the GMG North station stuff probably remained the same right until the text service closed completely in the mid 2000s.

October 28th 2002

Turns out the regional pages on Ceefax launched on November 17, 1997, so a few months after that Mother Teresa section was there.
http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/news/news_971113.html

Think I have a collection of the Carlton/LWT regional pages somewhere from their last few days of operation, before they were removed completely on New Years Day 2005. They're a mess of both generic 'ITV London' logos on some pages and obsolete Carlton/LWT logos on the other - I sent them to the mb21 website at the time (the January 2002 Carlton images on that site were also mine) but they never got uploaded. Will see if I still have them...

I actually feel a bit bad interrupting the PDC discussion here as it's gotten quite interesting, but I need to post this sooner or later.

Latest Updates - August 2017

It's been another very busy month on the site with over 140 new clips and 1100 images added, which is not too bad given I was away on holiday for part of it. September may be a bit of a quieter month due to having a wedding and a honeymoon for half of it which takes priority, but that's in the future.

Firstly, the site address www.tvwhirl.co.uk has been renewed for another 2 years in the last week. We've been on this same address since 2001 now, and this renewal takes us to 2019 and 18 years.

Updated Channel Presentation
Coverage has been updated for STV, STV2, ITV1, ITV2, ITV3 and Virgin1/Channel One, with lots of new clips and images added from across the past decade as I work through the stockpile of content.




New Channel Presentation
New channel coverage has been added for BBC HD, Really, Drama, Home, Freesports and ITV4, some current and some from the past.




TV Whirl - As it happens
Whilst there are many things I'm catching up on, there are also new things the site has been on hand to cover. The site was there as some of the new Really idents went to air for the first time, as well as providing coverage of the launch of Freesports at the end of August, and we've been the first for ongoing coverage throughout last weekend of STV2's special 60th birthday idents, with 9 of those added to the site since the 31st - not bad for someone who lives nowhere near Scotland, and who hasn't got his satellite back up and running... yet!

I've moved the PDC discussion

Teletext Update - 6/9/2017

Another update today. As many will know, today marks 20 years since the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. The Ceefax service has been there for a bit, but presented on site today are pages from the Channel 4 Teletext Ltd service that was being broadcast on that day too. With TV listings all in disarray, and their entire racing section suspended. Oh, and the Americans are already rumoured to be working out if they could turn this into a movie.



https://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/teletext/channel-4-teletext/

The Fastext links are two lines too high on that one. I wonder why?

I think (obviously hard to prove for sure) that's an error from the recovery software rather than anything deliberate. When there is a lot of double height lettering, it occasionally misses the double height character out of the recovery output - probably on a few of those 'empty' lines - and that seems to cause the whole thing to be shifted up. I've seen it happen a few times when there's been one of those adverts filling the bottom half of a TV Listing page and it contained a lot of double height lettering.