22 years of the 1997 BBC logo

Of course, it was initially planned for the UKTV channels to be BBC branded:

BBC Showcase
BBC Style
BBC Learning
BBC Horizon
BBC Arena
BBC Sport
BBC Radio 1 TV
BBC Catch-up

UK Gold and UK Living would have been unaffected and owned outright by Flextech.

But as soon as it became clear the channels would need advertising to support them, BBC Showcase and BBC Learning were spun off as BBC Choice and BBC Knowledge and the rest became a part of UKTV (or didn't surface at all).

When I was at Uni (93-96), the lads and I always pre-loaded on Big Break, Superman, and Noel's House Party.

Happy days.

Just to add, I still think the BBC logo from 1997 is timeless and they should never change it.

I’d always assumed UK Play evolved from the plans for BBC Radio 1 TV. Didn’t quite a few of the R1 presenters have shows on it in the early days such as Mark & Lard and Chris Moyles?

Yes a lot of the R1 lineup circa 1999/2000 was involved in Play UK in one form or another. Moyles had his (rather awful show), Mark and Lard had a gameshow, Scott Mills and Emma B presented The Phone Zone, a number of the specialist DJs had music programmes.

I did love UK Play/Play UK. Clearly run on an absolute shoestring but I watched it more than any other channel. Sadly in the last year they lurched away from the original concept and ploughed most of the budget into new comedy commissions in the evening that were never going to be able to compete with the bigger channels. They did actually get some early work by Mitchell & Webb and Russell Brand, but they were complete nobodies at that point and the channel didn't have enough reach for them to catch on.

Moyles certainly did. If I tell you it was made in TC0 you can probably get a feel for how big the budget and production values were.

It was my favourite channel at the time, though more for the comedy than the music. It was very popular amongst those working at the BBC too, it was always in the TV sets on the desks of the offices I visited and it was often available for viewing in places in TV Centre it probably shouldn't have been.

Run on a shoestring but even so it must have been UKTVs most expensive channel. Not only was there all the original and live programming but the music slots originally were all precompiled. Unlike MTV which will have had all their music videos in their playout system and just play them as needed, UK Play had all the music sequences in blocks that fitted between the ad breaks. Not much flexibility and I'd imagine quite time consuming/expensive. The music slots tended to be themed though and repeated fairly often

Eventually they built a system that could play the music 'live' but I don't think it started long before it closed

I did notice that the sequences of music videos ("The Sound of Play"?) often seemed to fall over. Around the time of the rebrand to Play UK they had a regular "Top 50" slot on a Saturday afternoon of videos themed around a certain genre or subject, which in those pre-YouTube days was quite exciting as you would often get some really rare and random stuff airing. But you could tell technically it seemed to be put together in a slightly haphazard way and I saw quite a few breakdowns whilst watching that show.

This was its last known sighting, at 0555 on July 24 2015:

Following from making lists of the programmes made for the early BBC digital channels, I recently tried making one for UK Play, which was more difficult because I didn't have much access to the channel, and it was not listed in Radio Times, so I'm sure it's nowhere near complete, but it's here if it's of interest:

https://www.desandmick.co.uk/television/bbcdigital/ukplay/

I read it was the longest lasting BBC ident of somesorts.