How can it be 30 years? This is a newspaper cutting that I've kept from where I first learnt about the upcoming rebrand:
I was a bit perturbed because first of all, I liked the BBC1 globe as it was and didn't want it to change, and this new globe looked a bit odd - why does Australia appear twice at the same time?
The BBC2 symbol also looked rather strange, and I couldn't work out what they meant by "nine different versions of the figure 2" - the concept of a set of multiple idents that BBC2 was about to pioneer just didn't exist at that time.
When the globe finally turned up to link into Going Live I really was appalled at the "complete and utter mess" (as I described it in my diary) - I couldn't believe the beautiful gold-and-blue world had been replaced by this incoherent mess with the continents barely visible for much of the time.
Then that afternoon at 2.45 I put BBC2 on to see their new look for the first time - but rather than the Blade ident that I had been expecting to see, instead there was the same shape 2 with paint being flung onto it sideways. At that point it instantly became clear what the newspaper report had meant - the idents before the programmes would vary, with the same figure 2 appearing in nine different situations. Again, this new ident was something of a shock to the system - up to now, channel symbols had always been serious, sobre affairs, so this Paint ident seemed a very strange and unexpected way to identify a television channel - but then, I suppose that's exactly the reaction they were hoping for.
Although these new BBC2 idents did take some getting used to I soon grew to like them, but I'm not sure I ever really liked that BBC1 globe.
