BBC TWO HD

Judging by that, I think Mirror has lost its ability to be used before Newsnight or any serious programme. I'm hoping for a more sombre version because so far, this is not good, emphasis on not.

A shame to lose the BBC HD idents - they were pretty special.

I would have much preferred for BBC Two / BBC Two HD to take the BBC HD idents as this batch of BBC2 ones is really dire.

Not. Mirror. Noooooooo.

That could have been really nice! They could have put the 2 in place of the diamond symbol. They were great idents, too.

Having gone back and reviewed a few of these in action, I do think the music change is yet another mistake made to these idents.

Another perfectly fine aspect of the remaining set has been given the chop - replaced by inferior soundtracks that lack the connection the originals had to the visuals.

At least, Northern Ireland made the best job of what they were given and have re-included the scene sound FX. They all work better as a result, but I'd particularly recommend checking out their versions of Zoetrope and both Seascapes - having that extra layer does much to improve the atmosphere and make them sound more complete.

If anything was to be changed, it would have been more appropriate and logical with the upgrade to the HD service to re-introduce Chase, and with that, Cappuccino - actually adding something back to the set in the process - instead of a poor change of music which is irrelevant to the actual HD aspect. But that was never going to happen, was it?

And... they've forgot to update the loop.

I take it you mean the 'This is BBC TWO' loop? It's not uncommon they were still showing Christmas programmes on BBC HD Preview in February. How long are the idents on the This is BBC TWO loop? You tend to get a good viewing usually.

I was never terribly keen on any of the versions of Chase, but although I wouldn't mind seeing Cappuccino back, we won't, as it seems to have been a victim of the baffling decision to move the box to the wrong side. At the moment on most of the idents the box appears at the start and then fades out to avoid clashing with the 2, except on Mirror when it fades in when the 2-shaped mirror has cleared enough space. However, with Cappuccino the box would look awkward on the right hand side at whatever point in the ident they tried to add it.

Probably the only good decision they've made in the last six years of these idents was to (very) briefly replace the box altogether with the BBC blocks - but I suppose they wanted to retain consistency with the other BBC channels by having the channel number spelt out.

Are these new pieces of music straight off some library CDs? The Mirror music sounds like something from a commercial radio advert for a kitchen showroom.

Weren't the old ones? See the video in the first post in this thread.

The Mirror ident music is 'Fitzpleasure' by alt-J, which is a little unexpected.

Towards the end of the BBC3 blog idents I seem to remember they used the instrumental of "In The Morning" by Razorlight after they dropped the original "Magic Number" audio, although you can imagine a channel like BBC3 doing it (BBC Choice used to change the soundtrack on their blocks idents every few months to a dance track of the time), less so BBC2. As I said before perhaps in the current climate it's about all they can do to freshen things every so often?