BBC One

I so much prefer Watchdog now to The Nicky Cambell days. I prefer the scarcastic manner and tongue in cheek of it all. I was over the moon when I heard Anne was coming back. She has no fear that women and is ideal for this programme. Just a shame they can't do more hard stuff, which is no fault of Anne! Oh no love Matt and Rough Traders too. Cracks me up!

The Watchdog programme and Anne's role just doesn't seem to work anymore for some reason. Rogue Traders should return to being a programme in it's own right however.

An odd end to Friday night as the Ceefax music just starting on BBC Two bled through into the final junction on One, making for a strangely decent HIGNFY trailer then over the Kites ident for a second or so. The ident was announcerless.

Brace yourselves...

So, as any self-respecting ident aficionado should know, when the BBC One Circles were improved/butchered (edit to suit) in May 2009, one of the smaller aspects lost were the elements within the idents interacting with the logo, ie the kites flying over it, the Jack Russell wandering across it and so forth.

In the case of Hippos, that meant going from this to this, which I'm sure we can agree just looks crap.

But wait... this afternoon BBC1 NI played the long version of the aforementioned and I was suitably aghast to see two of the red fishies swimming over the logo towards the end, as they always had done when the set first launched.

This has literally blown my mind ; I had put the absence of said details down to the re-editors, for whatever reason, not having access to the original masters with separate layers, now I don't know what to think. Might I add that such fish overlapping antics do not occur in the short form-up version.

I therefore humbly offer it to the gods of TVF to explain this strange and shocking anomaly.

PS it may not surprise you to learn I have crippling tonsillitis, so no, I really don't have anything better to do.

Hmm. I wonder if BBC One NI had a HD version, it would be in HD? Considering all of the BBC One idents were filmed in HD, and the actual text on the idents appears to be in HD, but not the video footage itself.

You had me excited there! I expected some big revelation!

Good point though, ITV1 didn't remove that exact same thing (objects over the logo) when they updated their logo and launched the HD service. If ITV can do it surely the BBC can.

Yes they did! Its only the 4 additions to the idents that have objects over the logo. The older idents (edited with the current logo) have nothing over the branding.

I'm shocked my post didn't live up to your obviously too high expectations.

And my point is actually why this occurs only at the end of one version of one ident. Surely they didn't re-edit the logo over the elements on purpose, despite having the option to leave things as they were, with this one erroneously slipping through the net?

That would just be a bizarre design choice but I can't think of a more logical/humorous explanation at present.

The idents you now see on BBC One England are made from the previous SD edit of the underlying footage (up-scaled) , with re-made graphics in HD to make them look a bit sharper (as BBC One England SD is now downscaled from BBC One HD).

The idents you see in the Nations have the original SD graphics.

Little random diversion.

Hidden amongst the wealth of dull BBC breakdowns on the web, this little gem from 1991. A rare prime-time cock-up. The VT machine plays up during an edition of The Generation Game.

Mark Devlin is the announcer - today's bland brigade could learn a thing or two here! No repetitive, uninformative announcements every 10 seconds and an ability to ad-lib - IMAGINE THAT! And was that a Brucie stutter thrown in for good measure?

Note the sync issue on loss of VT and again when the holding caption appears.

They were very quick to flick to the programme-specific slide - is this something that they would have had prepared for every show that was aired, ready to cut to at a moment's notice should something happen to require it?