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CBBC Birthday thread

Celebrating 30 Years of Children's BBC (September 2015)

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MA
mannewskev
I've just happened upon this on YouTube - a BFT from 1991



I hadn't realised that the 2Brave BFT theme was used before 1992 - presumably it was felt that it was better than the 1991 CBBC jingle, so 2Brave were asked to do variants on it for the main CBBC slots?


That's clip's Children's BBC as opposed to BFT. I think that theme was mainly the Children's BBC2 theme for Sunday mornings? Also used for Christmas Children's BBC.

BU
buster
Yeah as I understand it the 1991 theme wasn't particularly good or distinctive so they got 2 Brave to repurpose their 1989-1991 "Children's BBC Two" (or just "Children's BBC" when it was on BBC1 holiday mornings) theme instead. For BFT they stuck it over the top of the 1991 BFT titles...big on recycling in the early 90s!

Would love to find a fuller version of the 1992 BFT theme. That credit roll is brilliant, and the opening is pretty catchy too.
MA
mannewskev
Yeah as I understand it the 1991 theme wasn't particularly good or distinctive so they got 2 Brave to repurpose their 1989-1991 "Children's BBC Two" (or just "Children's BBC" when it was on BBC1 holiday mornings) theme instead. For BFT they stuck it over the top of the 1991 BFT titles...big on recycling in the early 90s!

Would love to find a fuller version of the 1992 BFT theme. That credit roll is brilliant, and the opening is pretty catchy too.


This clip features a few versions of the 91-92 theme. Think I prefer the initial, rockier version...

16 days later

BE
benriggers
I seem to remember in the very early days of running kids programmes in the mornings on BBC2, they used CBBC idents, slides and menus, but these were voiced by the on duty announcer. Needless to say this was during the experimental stage of it, not too long after they brought IVC to the morning slot.

Do you mean this?
AN
Andrew Founding member
As seen on many of the clips, BFT in the Summer ran for 8 weeks to cater for Scotland. Did they commission 8 weeks of programmes of stuff like Why Don't You?, as surely they could have repeated the first 2 weeks in the last 2 weeks as no children would have seen the full 8 weeks.
NW
nwtv2003
I seem to remember in the very early days of running kids programmes in the mornings on BBC2, they used CBBC idents, slides and menus, but these were voiced by the on duty announcer. Needless to say this was during the experimental stage of it, not too long after they brought IVC to the morning slot.

Do you mean this?


Indeed, the exact same.
VM
VMPhil
I seem to remember in the very early days of running kids programmes in the mornings on BBC2, they used CBBC idents, slides and menus, but these were voiced by the on duty announcer. Needless to say this was during the experimental stage of it, not too long after they brought IVC to the morning slot.

Do you mean this?

Wow, that menu has managed to make that ident even more garish.
SW
Steve Williams
As seen on many of the clips, BFT in the Summer ran for 8 weeks to cater for Scotland. Did they commission 8 weeks of programmes of stuff like Why Don't You?, as surely they could have repeated the first 2 weeks in the last 2 weeks as no children would have seen the full 8 weeks.


PEDANTRY AHOY! There were no new programmes shown in the summer holidays - the episodes of Why Don't You shown during the summer were repeats of episodes first shown at Christmas and Easter. Everything else, bar the home-made CBBC shows like The O Zone, was also a repeat.
:-(
A former member
This changed in 1994? when BFT was dropped and BBC Scotland had to provide is own line up. Thus we ended up with Mega mag. for around three years.
BU
buster
There was also a year or two (2003-ish) where the CBBC channel team in Studio 2 provided the Scotland and Northern Ireland summer holidays continuity, whilst the BBC2 Breakfast Show continued before school as per usual. The CBBC channel had a giant "2" in the studio which must have confused a few kids. It also had the odd effect that BBC2 Scot and NI couldn't go on air till 7am, when the channel did, so they filled with Ceefax, meaning there was in fact less kids output than in England and Wales!
SW
Steve Williams
This changed in 1994? when BFT was dropped and BBC Scotland had to provide is own line up. Thus we ended up with Mega mag. for around three years.


Well, it was only for a few years that CBBC ran right from the beginning of July, and I think BBC Scotland still did their own holiday shows for other Scottish holidays that didn't match English holidays. The Untied Shoelaces Show ran for years of course and I know there was something called Go For X in the early nineties because I remember someone writing into the Radio Times pointing out Sally Gray had referred to a bidet as "a children's sink". And Northern Ireland had their own kids show in the mid-nineties as well, Over The Wall, because that was repeated on the network.

Presumably this was around the time BBC Scotland opened their own kids department - in the mid-nineties they pledged 25% of kids shows were now going to be made there - so it made more sense for them to do it to give them more to do.

And before that, in the early eighties, before any CBBC branding and daytime TV, BBC Scotland and Northern Ireland would indeed show kids shows in early July, when England and Wales showed nothing at all, and then vice versa at the end of August, with the same programmes, albeit all repeats.
BB
BBCME Founding member
Here is a very rare CBBC TWO Scotland ident used before the Scottish school holiday opt outs.

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