BBC One Christmas 2009 - Doctor Who ident revealed

The beeb managed to have headphones for the oov announcers and earpieces for Phillip Schofield and company in the Broomcupboard didn't they?

I'd have thought that talkback would be a quite important, if for no other reason than making sure that the announcer could be told what the hell is going on during a breakdown.

There are lots of reasons why BBC 1 does not always hit-the-mark on its idents, in the way some people here might expect.

Apart from two news programmes per day, C4 is not a "reactive" channel... and even then, those news programmes may well work to fixed off-air times.

BBC 1 and BBC 2 are"reactive" channels, with lots of live content all day. The live content is never taken off-air at a fixed time... it comes off when it is finished. This means that trails are constantly being added/dropped to/from the schedule... sometimes this even happens during the junction (junction is the BBC term for a break) with seconds to spare... in order to keep the channel on track to hit the correct transmission times of the programmes.

The idents and Next/Later menus play their part in this too... by having time added or subtracted... again this often happens seconds before they take to air. A perfect example of this is the 12:15 junction on BBC 1... the ident has to expand or contract by however much the 12:15 news update has over-run or under-run by in order for BBC 1 to be able to hit the BBC News at 1 at the top of the hour. The idents are often viewed as more expendable than the trails, unless there is a specific content/warning anno which needs to be made.

To make things even more complicated... the nations will often by coming off live local programmes while at the same time BBC England is coming off a live programme... the poor director/announcer in the nations is faced with a situation where he/she doesn't know if the local programme will come off on time, and doesn't know if the network programme will start at the right time either.

You may well ask why the announcers do not tailor their scripts to better fit the duration of the idents. As in every job, some people are better than it than others... however, most do their best, and may well be restricted by having to fit in a certain message/form of words on the ident. The current BBC 1 idents themselves are also more restrictive than those in the past. In the current set of idents the logo forms-up at roughly the same time on each one... unlike the Balloons which had over 50 different versions with lots of different form-up times which allowed the ident to be changed to one which fitted with script (rather than making the script fit the ident). The Dancers had the logo on from the start and had various points in the music where it was appropriate to start speaking, so they were a bit more flexible too.

Hopefully that helps explain things a little.

Yep, you would think that... but UTV don't even have talkback from ITV1 to let them know what is happening between programmes. There is a red phone (or at least used to be), which ITV1 can use to contact UTV and STV. UTV leaves and joins each programme manually. They don't have a full automation system either, and judge the timings by looking at the clock and referring to timings on paper schedules supplied by Leeds.

Ooh thanks for that denton. I suppose the ident - whilst obviously the most flexible point - also has the distinction of showing the changes most clearly as the thing fakes out before the logo even appears.

Some very interesting points on other things though. You do actually forget how little of C4 is live apart from news and Big Brother. I was considering that the other night with regards to E4. I have Ugly Betty on series link on my V+ and the recording ALWAYS starts just as the final Friends sponsorship clip begins (give or take a second or two) each week.



That's another point I'd not considered actually. I think it shows a lack of joined up thinking on the part of Red Bee to be honest, given that they are the transmitting company stuff like this should occur to them and the idents should have had different lengths / shorter versions. In the end it appears we've had the worst of both worlds with inflexably long versions to begin with and now horridly chopped short ones.

Quite why the long versions were not kept on the server alongside the new edits however is another question but given the two recent BBC2 tweaks by the visionaries at Red Bee nothing surprises me.

It is classed as a 'reactive' channel - the number of news or live programmes isn't what makes a channel 'reactive'.

A channel such as Discovery or Gold or Sky 1 are classed as non-reactive channels, they are planned further ahead and things won't change once their schedules are finalised. Also their programmes are mostly delivered and ready in advance. If a major news event happened they'd just keep going and not respond (except in extreme circumstances a pointer to a news channel) Because of this they have a high level of automation as all they need to do is play out a series of items with no tinkering.

A 'reactive' channel such as BBC1 or Channel 4 not only has to react to news events - they'll have newsflashes if needed, and would react as necessary if there was a significant death (The Royal Family for example). They will also have many live programmes or ones delivered near to TX (the same for trails) and announcements that are either live or recorded specifically that day. The pres schedules for something like Channel 4 will be planned a couple of days ahead and will be changed as needed while on air. The directors/TCs looking after them will have more ability to change and amend the schedule.

I remember being told years ago that the way that the BBC and C4 traditionally set up their pres areas for announcements was different.

At the BBC if an announcer over-ran the symbol they'd stay on air even after the programme started - the directors audio desk worked independently of the automation so as long as they were faded up the announcer was on air. At C4 it was apparently set up so that the announcer would be cut off by the programme... which caused a few issues over the years if the last word in the announcement was something like 'country'

Yes indeed, C4 is much more reactive than the channels which are set in stone weeks in advance and have no live programming at all... and I don't doubt the ability of the directors/TCs to react if faced with breaking news or schedule changes.

However, the point I made was that BBC 1 and BBC 2 have much much more live programming than C4... and it was the need to constantly be "reactive" to the over-runs and under-runs of these programmes, in order to meet fixed points, that I referred to. Not the occasional late delivery of a programme or trail. Indeed, BBC 1 and BBC 2 are faced with these challenges on top of everything else.

Just looking at tomorrow's BBC 1 listings, I can see 12 obvious things which could cause the network director/announcer (and nations) to have to make "reactive" changes to the schedule at short notice... 7 of which may have to be made during junctions.

Apart from a possible over-run or under-run of C4s two news programme; and the vague possibility of late delivery of 3 Minute Wonder, Deal or No Deal, Paul O'Grady, Hollyoaks, Christmas at River Cottage, and Man on Earth (none of which are exactly Panorama and likely to be editing up to the wire) the only changes that should really be made to tomorrow's C4 schedule would be tinkering by their media planners over where to place trails. Most of the rest of the output is made up of repeats, and stuff that would have been in the can weeks if not months ago. Indeed... most of the programmes I've listed above have probably been in the can for days, if not weeks/months.

this might sound daft but nice way to start the day with the news variant of the ident,

delroy sounded cheerful this morning

http://up.metropol247.co.uk/george12345/0600%20-%2014th%20december%200.mp3

I don't have caoture card audio file only

Shame the "Subtitles" graphic needs to remain on screen all the way through the Xmas ident's lengthy build-up rather than coming up with the logo at the end. In fact, why it is needed at all, when subtitling is 100% now isn't it? (there was certainly something on the Press Office pages along those lines a while back)

"Cheerful"? Not particularly, if you ask me.

On the subject of subtitles tags, I notice the one on BBC Two's Christmas idents has actually been reduced in size post-refresh. A first?

For flying f*** sake, are you for real? I think EastEnders is the biggest pile of crap on TV at the moment but I would never even consider to delete BBC 1 from my Digi box because of the show, let alone for a 15 second ident.

Get real