Best Era of ITV

Looking at that, it does indeed look very cluttered! I wasn't aware of the ident changing that went on at this time.
I've always received Carlton and Meridian, so I was never exposed to those changes...

But I still stand by my support for the hearts era....

Meridian and Anglia didn't drop the live action sequences until Autumn 2001, and unlike the GMG North stations, continued to use the lines ident in full. GMG North used the wonderful 'lines without music' or 'already formed up' idents - if you can call them idents. They might as well have just used static captions...

I also thought it was a shame that the 'daytime' versions of the hearts idents were rarely used... and then dropped. IMO they were rather nice.

ITV1's idents right now are pretty crap. The hearts were very good (except they weren't shown in bonnie Scotland ).

Yeah but those "blue Square" idents were really made, rare for idents which concern people in any way (Celtic Girl/Dogs was particularly good). I've never seen the generic ident of this set - anyone know where I can find it?

I didn't know one existed!

You got that right, all Granada regions had it bad, here's an example from late 2001....

http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/itv1_gra_osjunk.jpg

Yes all the GMG northern regions messed up the hearts ident, the CARLTON regions executed their ident and presentation package to precision, I was glad that we had the privilige to watch it off Sky Digital.

I personally thing the best era of ITV was before 1993 though, Thames were making some excellent network programming, and there was a lot more variety in the network programming, these days it's soaps, soaps, soaps.

Jeez that looks crap!

I alway think Anglias flag idents and clock were some of the best around - certainly better than anything around today IMHO.

...but were an unfortunate shade of **** brown!

Something I really did like about the hearts era were the second (flashy lines) and third (smokey hearts) endboard designs, which were really very classy. The ECP graphics with the smokey hearts were nice too, as were the additional break bumpers used by GMG North.

I never liked the idents themselves and still don't, and my reasons for this are summarised basically by this clip. The 'lines' form-up simply looked horrendous with anything other than the generic ITV logo. I also disliked the piano version of the jingle that was supposed to go with the live-action idents, and clearly UNM did too because Meridian/Anglia/HTV used the strings music on all of the idents (except for the brief period between the renaming to ITV1 and the live-action idents being dropped).

The YTV Liquid Gold ident is my all time favorite, the LWT blinds was class as well, and who could forget the Central cake, the Thames Kalidoscope ident(is that what it was called?), class idents from a bygone age.