20 years next year since Bravo Timewarp TV ended

In February next year it will be 20 years since Bravo ditched the Timewarp TV format to become a lad's night in TV channel.

I didn't like old style Bravo at the time so I was excited when a new channel Trouble turned up on Bravo bandwidth space, shame I hated when it hand over another channel which was a revamped Bravo.

Looking back ditching a Timewarp TV image too soon was a mistake, they should've launched a lads channel on the weekends at the same time as Trouble launch and left Bravo alone. Had Flextech understood the support of Timewarp TV format of at the time it would've been success well into the 21st century but I'm not sure it would've competed in the digital TV environment.

Next years it would be 20 years since Challenge TV and as mentioned Trouble were born.

By "Timewarp TV" do you mean they showed really old shows?

It was a classic movies and TV channel before it became an awful lads channel.

What followed the Timewarp TV era has got to have been an absolute low for British TV. It was such a jarring and misguided revamp, totally at odds with what came before it and, at times, pretty crass and unpleasant to watch.

What programmes made Bravo trashy compared to its previous focus towards ITC content? As far as I'm aware - the direction taken to turn it into a lads channel was terrible for Bravo as a whole.

I actually wonder what Sky would have done had they not closed it down.

They would've probably offloaded their less-valuable stuff into it, like Road Wars and the sort.

The Timewarp TV-era was long gone by the time we got cable, so I'm none the wiser. However, I don't recall the content being anywhere near as bad as some of the stuff we get nowadays on the likes of ITV2.

Street Crime UK was decent though!

Bravo had a fantastic ident in the Timewarp TV era...



Everything just seemed to work in that era - a clear sense of identity for the channel, with a name that suited that identity. Nothing seemed to gel after the relaunch - why keep a name that says 'old-fashioned appreciation' for a channel with a completely different focus and target audience.

The relaunch was the first example I remember of a channel with a clear purpose moving away from it. It's happened all over the place since then. Channels like The History Channel, National Geographic and Discovery all once had clear propositions (history, nature, informative documentaries) but now just show interchangeable reality shows a lot of the time.

The original Bravo channel was a very low budget affair, distributing its programmes on low-band Umatic tapes direct to cable headends. It showed old B/W movies and some ancient TV series. It shared management with Home Video Channel. The 'Timewarp TV' concept was the second incarnation of the channel.

To be fair about Family channel has already mophed into Challenge by this point in time 20 years ago.

Although most of the content/video was straight from the various ITV network CrimeFighters shows that were doing the rounds in the early 00s. Susan Rae narrated the show really well.

Street Crime UK ended up an oddly fascinating watch by the end, as the older the episodes the older the footage - some dating right back to the early-mid 1990s, meaning you got to watch criminals getting nicked while also getting a delightfully nostalgic look at the cars and fashion of the times.

The older the footage, the more I used to imagine where the people being arrested are today, and if they knew that video of a younger/drunken them being dragged kicking and screaming into a police car was being given regular repeat airings on a cable TV channel...