CBBC Birthday thread

Yes, I think the New Year's Day '94 pre-rec was "Almost Live, Definitely Kicking." Andi seems to reference it in saying "we're back from Birt Island", whatever Birt Island was... (Jokey reference to John Birt?)

It's 'Burgh Island', which was the location of the story/drama the previous week. There's a clip of John Barrowman doing a song'n'dance number from that show elsewhere on YouTube.

I don't think that is a cut down set, that is what eventually became the permanent performance / video hit or miss area. The spiral stair case to the left hung around for 4 years (it got taller and grew up to the top of the structure) even though the balcony and rails all slowly got chopped away. Meaning the stairs went nowhere but up. You can see what I mean in this clip (39 seconds is a good angle comparison).



I think they were getting used to the space and hadn't quite got round to designating parts of the set for specific things, I know they used the area by the larger staircases as a performance area a lot more than they ended up doing further down the years

In the first year after Christmas 93 the set had some alterations and lost the second staircase from the centre of the studio, that seemed to free up camera angles to the area that became the standard sofa spot with the phone area above, by the second series the video wall had gone and gained a spiral staircase and the performance area had lost the balcony etc. there were other seemingly random little changes as well like adding diagonal floor areas in the corners of the upper level, and dropping a few of the side wings that disguised the studio exits.

You can see in this clip how the soon to be standard use of the set was fitted around the original design, which by the second series had been adjusted to make it all fit better.



Also in this clip from he very first show you can see that the sofa area is not where it ended up for the rest of the series and the staircase that disappeared by 94

This is a clip people might consider interesting- Andi starts in Studio A, walks down the corridor into the BBC1 Network Control and finally into the broomcupboard- gives you a good idea of how things were laid out in Pres at that time!

I have memories of something similar from a Sunday(?) where it started on BBC1 in the broom cupboard and then changed channels to BBC2. At the start on BBC2 you saw him walking out of the broom cupboard and into Studio A.

Is there any reason the BBC1 globe introduces the first episode of L&K whereas some clips I've seen have the CBBC ident into the titles?

The cue dots give us a clue here. The CBBC ident was played out by pres, the globe came from TC7.

I suspect the Ratz introduction bit was pre-recorded and put at the beginning of the title sequence. Perhaps, for whatever reason, they weren't able to get hold of a copy of the CBBC ident (or maybe not one with a long hold) so used the globe instead. Or there was some operational reason why Pres wanted to play out the ident rather than TC7.

Since Little Britain, I doubt "A Little Bit of Bitty" would work nowadays....

Barrowman has said in interviews since that the production team actually only wanted two presenters and the idea of having three was foisted on them from higher up (possibly to try and avoid direct comparisons with Going Live), and they generally found it quite hard to find enough for all three to do without one of them looking like a spare part. Peters and Forbes worked well together so Barrowman was the obvious one to ease out, especially as he was a bit of an acquired taste.



More than likely they just wanted to use the globe to make it look a bit special having a proper announcement before it.

Cheers for that info, I do wonder what ever happened to Ratz, and why was he dropped.

Well, it was pretty irritating and I don't think many viewers liked it, and I suppose it would have been awkward for the presenters and guests to interact with a virtual puppet they couldn't see. That's no slight on Paul Brophy who performed as him who was a very funny performer in his own right, as he illustrated on Fully Booked, and he was witty enough in this role, it was just a bit awkward, and presumably they kept it for as long as they could to justify the cost - of course he later transferred to the Broom Cupboard - and then abandoned it. Then of course he was replaced by conventional puppets who could get in guests' faces and go everywhere and didn't involve a load of complicated mechanics.

I'm sure he was on CBBC before L&K started (maybe introduced at the same time), I think he did both in tandem for that year. When it came to CBBC I think he was mostly doing Sunday mornings with Phillipa in Studio A towards the end, where he was appearing on the video wall (so I guess easier to interact with) though I do have some footage of him in the broomcupboard with Toby from early 94. Not sure exactly when he went, but I've seen footage of him on some links from the desert island set on the roof of TVC that they used over Summer 1994, between leaving the broomcupboard and going to Studio A full time. he was definately gone by the end of the summer and the move to Studio A, that's when they introduced Otis (I remember them running some cryptic trailer about the "Children's BBC Aardvark" during that summer leading up to his introduction).