I was having a look back at some of the Central cake idents on TV Ark the other day, and it really made me realise how little imagination there seems to be these days in TV presentation.
When it comes down to it, there's nothing really wrong with ITV1's current graphical form-up idents - they're nice enough, but they're just not very exciting. If only some of the creativity from the likes of the Central cakes or Carlton Hearts had gone into them they could have been so much more impressive and attention-grabbing.
Ah, bring back the old nighttime idents of strange neon dancers! Wish ITV would bring some of the old idents back, particularly the regional idents, if only for one day! Really miss the Central 'cake' and Thames.
It looks like the fact ITV has gone to the extreme of rubbish idents and programmes has make us all appreciate the regions and their identities a lot more. Such a shame.
The classic Central cake idents were brilliant - and do show how a look can be spread across channels but be completly different!
It wasn't a planned uniformed look - and they have no real connection, but in the early 90's the Central Cake look and original Channel 4 idents meant the two stations could have been related - just by the use of colour.
Perhaps C4 did inspire the Central Cake look - I guess their are similarities - but the simple use of a 3D coloured logo on a black background meant they could have been sister stations - although they weren't!
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 knew there were THREE different endboard designs in the hearts era....the only one I remember was the wavy bar down the right-hand side of the screen with the smokey hearts in the background, and I know that came in in late 2000. I thought this was the very first of ITV's generic end credit designs.
Tyne Tees stopped using clocks 'proper' around 1988 when they finally put their mechanical timepiece out to pasture. AIUI the next clock was merely a stopgap used for a short time in 1996 after the time that IVC was ditched, but before the C3NE branding came in. As with the BBC One clock at the end of it's life, I think I'm right in saying that this wasn't a real live timepiece, but merely a piece of tape showing a particular time that was played out in the same way as any other ident.
It was a real (electronic) clock, played out from Leeds and it was the same timepiece used on YTV at the same time (just superimposed onto a different backdrop). That clock was never used when a Newcastle announcer was doing his/her job, only when the continuity was fully from Leeds -- and it had been used on and off overnight from 1994. TTTV had got rid of their clock in September 1989 after attempts to bring the knackered 1970s technology in line with the generic ITV look of 89 failed, and Tyne Tees management were too tight to buy electronic timepiece software. The old 80s electronic clock (complete with 80s logo) continued to be used in Newcastle through the 90s internally for reasons unknown to me, but it was available on one of the monitors in Studio 5.
I personally think the rot in ITV started in the late 1980s. Something of the station's character seemed to fade around 1988-89, it wasn't anything to do with the presentation and it's difficult to put a finger on it, but by 1994/5 ITV was already a mere shadow of its former self.
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 knew there were THREE different endboard designs in the hearts era....the only one I remember was the wavy bar down the right-hand side of the screen with the smokey hearts in the background, and I know that came in in late 2000. I thought this was the very first of ITV's generic end credit designs.
Psst, I made the first quote, not Spencer
Perhaps I should explain myself...
These are what I refer to as endboards:
98-99 (Pre-Generic)
http://thetvroom.com/images-anglia/images-00/caption-next.jpg (Okay, so that isn't a Network endboard, it's an Anglia next caption, but I'm pretty sure that this design was used for Network promos in the year before the rebrand - could someone set me straight on this?)
I seem to remember another generic trailer endboard was being used in 1998 in the final few months of the old IT* logo. It had a black background and a series of horizontal white lines from memory. Can't seem to find any caps of it anywhere tho.
Well, you can say that with a big smile as you had both your own regional name and the Carlton hearts idents *mutters*
Now *that* represented perfection, even with the slightly odd heart-shaped wipe. One thing they could have done is tweaked the colour of the spinning hearts so that it matched the Carlton ident it was based on. The last ever HTV branded ident from HTV Wales did alter the colour of the background, so it could always have been done.
Incidentally, what a cock up that last announcement was - someone went to the trouble of making a special edit of an ident reserved for sombre occasions - without the ITV1 logo or itv.com URL on it - and then the announcer makes a totally standard 'You're watching HTV, ITV1 in Wales announcement')
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I really am pleasantly surprised to see how many people loved the so-called 'Hearts Era' of 2000-2002. I didn't think many thought it was that good before this thread was started. I thought it was great - both the idents and the ECPs.
The ECP wasn't bad in itself (once they've altered the font so that it was actually possible to read the credits) but the scaled down endboards looked stupid, and certain policies in the credit rules were questionable (like still needing to use an ECP credits window even if the programme had little or no credits - ITN News being a good example of this).
As well as that the burn-on ECP template meant firstly that the credits looked odd if no ECP was run, and also that those credits only looked right on ITV itself, but many producers (not Carlton) were too lazy to make 'real' credits for programmes they were likely to export. Not a direct fault of network centre, but they could have inserted a clause where the ECP window was a copyrighted design that couldn't be used for export copies - it looked plain daft when TV4 Sweden started running Emmerdale with small compressed credits on the right and a big empty space on the left.
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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...
Despite being as dull as ditchwater, using the jingle more sparingly as GMG North did made the idents a little more palatable. It's not that's there's anything wrong with the jingle (and it's certainly catchy) but that there was only 2 versions of it (both of which sounded so similar that most people probably couldn't tell the difference) and that Meridian and Anglia played it out almost every single f**ing time made it get very grating very quickly.
There was a nice bit of presentation going on on Border in late 2001 - just before 6PM a Border-branded programme menu would come up and the anno would run through the night's programmes (which were 'here on Border this evening'), then it would cut to the Lookaround titles which included a burned-on generic ident with no announcement. I thought this worked very well and somehow for that 30 seconds Border seemed to be a million miles away from Leeds-based GMG North continuity. Sadly by early 2002 it was gone.
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Ah, bring back the old nighttime idents of strange neon dancers!
Don't they still pop up occasionally on UTV?
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Perhaps C4 did inspire the Central Cake look - I guess their are similarities - but the simple use of a 3D coloured logo on a black background meant they could have been sister stations - although they weren't!
I've got a clip (I forget where from) of some mid-80's Central presentation which was trailing what was on Central and what was on C4. It was a split screen afair in which one of the Central idents and one of the Channel 4 idents animated onto the screen (and incidentally, next to the respective channel's logo was - ahem -
a small window showing a clip from the programme
- yep ITV's 'innovative' new presentation style was being done by Central 20 years ago). The two idents side by side did genuinely look like they could have been part of the same package.
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I seem to remember another generic trailer endboard was being used in 1998 in the final few months of the old IT* logo. It had a black background and a series of horizontal white lines from memory. Can't seem to find any caps of it anywhere tho.
Westcountry was doing something odd around this time. When NPU trailers were first introduced (which I think *was* just before the ITV logo changed), Westcountry took them but substituted the generic endboard with one of their own design (the same design which was used for their final set of self-made promos in early 1998). They also continued to superimpose their 'blue strap' DOG onto the trailers which appeared on the trailer throughout as it had done from day 1.
Yet despite going to the trouble to make their own custom edits of these trailers, both the DOG and the endboard didn't carry any Westcountry branding - they had the ITV logo instead! Why go to the trouble of making a local edit of a trailer if you're then going to brand them with only the network brand which was on the trailer in the first place?
Anyway, this didn't last long and they went on to take totally generic NPU trailers (with no editing of the local name on as other stations did) when the ITV logo changed.
Which ITV Plc region do people think best uses the corporate ITV Graphics look on their news programmes etc?
I do like the way that Granada Reports mixes the title music with the 'Special Report' music, though I wouldn't say they make the best use of the package. Meridian doesn't do anything special, but at least their set goes with the graphics package now...
Which ITV Plc region do people think best uses the corporate ITV Graphics look on their news programmes etc?
For me it probably has to be London Tonight, even though it is God awful. But it has the use of the mini ITV News set, same style desk, an excellent backdrop of Central London and on-screen captions and astons that are the same as ITV News, though remember no other region can do this, as LT is made by ITN, so they probably have the same sort of software enabling the same sort of graphics as ITV News.
Meridian Tonight looks better now, though I don't approve of the screen showing blue and yellow squares, it would look better if they had a shot of Southampton or something, even though they're not there anymore. But from what I have seen it's graphics have been improved, and the captions can animate aswell now, alá ITV News.
I'm hoping Granada Reports is next, it has a good graphics package IMO, they also use it to their own taste, for instance instead of.....
Granada Reports
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Manchester: (Story goes here)
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...but the set is again God awful and very out of place, but it was designed for the old look, it just doesn't fit in with the ITV generic feel.
The ECP wasn't bad in itself (once they've altered the font so that it was actually possible to read the credits) but the scaled down endboards looked stupid, and certain policies in the credit rules were questionable (like still needing to use an ECP credits window even if the programme had little or no credits - ITN News being a good example of this).
As well as that the burn-on ECP template meant firstly that the credits looked odd if no ECP was run, and also that those credits only looked right on ITV itself, but many producers (not Carlton) were too lazy to make 'real' credits for programmes they were likely to export. Not a direct fault of network centre, but they could have inserted a clause where the ECP window was a copyrighted design that couldn't be used for export copies - it looked plain daft when TV4 Sweden started running Emmerdale with small compressed credits on the right and a big empty space on the left.
I don't actually think the scaled-down endboards looked that bad - and they WERE readable!!!
However, I definitely agree with the ITN News example - this is the one, and I do mean the ONE and ONLY case in which I feel today's generic end credits are much better suited. The plain white writing in the centre-bottom of the screen is perfect to finish a news broadcast.
Also, I don't agree that they looked odd if no ECP was run - as i've mentioned before, the majority of programmes had some kind of animated design going on in the left-hand window. One show I always thought worked perfectly with these endboards was This Morning - they use to play a brief highlight video from the show in the left hand window as the credits played on the right, and it looked great.
So, my idea for ITV
- Bring back these 2000-2002 endboards
- Keep the current ones (or something similar) for news broadcasts.
- And yes, definitely design alternative credits for exported programmes.
