30 years Since Central cake

One of the must enduring ITV idents was created 30 years ago tomorrow on 5 august 1985. AS far as we know, IT was DEFO August 85. there is a clip on TV ark last week of August using the branding.

Although Central had been using the coloured strips since early 1982, it wasn't until this point in time when the cake was introduced. It was part of a new package " one to watch " launched around 5 August 1985, as part of a wider range improved continuity purposes. mind you invision announcers in-vision were still in use and thus the cake ident did not always appear, but would pop up every where else to begin with.


Someone has done a tribute to this point:



To be fair some people were rather unhappy about the new presentation....
Drect link which will not work: http://www.tv-ark.org.uk/mivana/mediaplayer.php?id=74de5279800c6f9aaf8103543cd8f563&media=central_post_viewercomments&type=mp4

Video: Central Post from 1985 Near the bottom....


Here are some more pieces from the 1985 to 1986 package.

What's sad is that it's now been gone longer than it was on air.

We lost some classic logos due to ITV consolidation.

We lost all of them. The only regions still not using the ITV brand are Ulster, Scottish, and Grampian - but their classic logos went away before Yorkshire's and Granada's did (Ulster's in 1993, Scottish's and Grampian's in 2000, compared to 2002 for the Granada regions).

Was it ever established what the cake was supposed to represent - or the other two logos for that matter?

It didn't have to represent anything other than the company. It is an absolute classic though and although the simpler logo on black ones have now dated, I think some of their more advanced approaches to forming the logo look as good now as they did then.

Were they made by Lambie Nairn - they don't seem to be credited with them but you'd have thought they and C4 would have had something to say about the similarities.

Central had a team producing them in house in Nottingham in the late 80s and 90s. They also made Carlton's mid-90s idents. I don't know if they were behind the original batch of cake stuff, but I've never seen anything to contrary.

I postage a very nice email reply from head of Central presentation a few years back on this site, I'm unsure if he still works for ITV duty office, but he must be getting long in the tooth now The one thing that always stuck out to me how many piece were created in house for the look, I think over 100'000 different clips etc .

The original pre-CGI logo was supposed to be a UFO. I believe Central took out ads in Midlands newspapers prior to launch which spoofed reported sightings of UFOs across skies in the region. It got mixed a reception (no pun intended). It always looked more like a star or a planet to me. The 'cake' is merely a stylised, CGI interpretation of the previous logo. Nothing more really.

All the idents up to 1998 were in house. The design of the logo itself could be different although I'd think we'd know about it if Lambie Nairn were involved. It's quite evident from the early cake animations that Channel 4 was the big inspiration that Central's presentation department drew from. Whilst it might be hard to appreciate these days, Channel 4s blocks idents were simply in another league compared to anything the BBC or the ITV companies had at the time. Not only were they CGI but there were several variants of them, which was unusually diverse for that era.

Central really were leagues ahead in terms of presentation.

I've read somewhere that the original Central 'UFO' logo was designed by Minale Tattersfield, who were the design agency behind the classic long running Thames skyline identity.
I presume the in house design team adapted it to come up with the cake logo.

It's the letter C isn't it?

The bigger mystery is why people call it the cake. Was that ever the official name or just one given by pres fans more recently?

It doesn't depict how you cut a cake and the original ident makes no reference to it either


Incidentally I do know that the last Thames logo was called, at least in some parts of the company as the 'ice cream cone'... I saw it written on its tape box in Teddington's VT department