BBC1 COW globe @ 20!

Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday BBC1 COW globe!
Happy birthday to you!

Yes - it's the BBC1 Computer Originated World ident's 20th anniversary today. It debuted at 7:00pm on Monday 18th February 1985. It may no longer be on our screens, but I think that even today, the COW makes a fantastic BBC1 ident. It was so popular, that it lasted all the way until 15th February 1991 - 6 years later. Was this your favourite globe? The picture below is from Meldrum.



http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/identzone/bbc1/images/bbc1_cow.jpg

i see a pattern developing here.

Hehe done it in the BBC Two thread aswell:



Anyway, I think the COW was the best globe ever made. Although I was only 1 when they took it away, looking back at clips etc I think it's excellent. By the way, was there ever any music to it?

No. Apart from the National Anthem at closedowns of course!

There's never been a cow, or any other animal ident on the BBC has there?

Hilarious! I'm creasing with laughter here!

you probably are, thats the sad thing.

Even 20 years on, it does still look good. The quality of the computer generated image was amazing by 1985 standards.

A technical question... perhaps noggin or someone else will know the answer to...

I believe (at least in London) that the COW was constantly generated live by a piece of hardware. Rather than simply being a computer animation recorded on to tape or lazerdisc for playout, as the next globe was. Is this correct? If so, why was it done this way? Does anybody know what became of that piece of hardware? Is it sitting in some annoraks spare room still generating a BBC 1 Globe?

am i the only person who seriously can't get excited about a revolving globe? it's a picture of the world with a black background, hardly awe-inspiring.

It would have worn well were it still on screen wouldn't it? I doubt the current set of idents will look nearly as good in 20 years time.

Twenty years, good grief...

This was the first ident change that I was old enough to be aware of, and it's a day I remember very well. Luckily it was half term, so I got up expecting to see the new BBC1 globe, as I was led to believe by the Radio Times it would be launching in the morning, and was rather disappointed to see the old mirror globe (which by this time looked desperately old-fashioned and was in dire need of replacement) was still there.

Somehow or other I managed to find out that the new globe had in fact been delayed till 7.00, but never mind there was still the excitement of the new computerised weather forecasts to come at lunchtime.

But still what I was looking forward to most was the new globe. At 6.35 the old one was shown for the last time, and then at 7.00 the new globe finally appeared, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant, completely bowled over by how beautiful it looked and what a breath of fresh air it was compared to its predecessor. And yes, it’s amazing how it still manages to look so good a whole two decades later!

(By the way, although I do think it's the best ident of all time, I'm not necessarily advocating that it should be brought back!)

It was 1985, there would have been no commercially available equipment to produce such an animation all day every day, there were no video tape formats suitable either - VT came from big machines run by engineers in the basement. Laserdisc would have been around, but the special broadcast quality version the BBC used wouldn't have been and it probably wouldn't have bee suitable and reliable enough