FA
Feeling nostalgic this morning. I noticed the date and realised that 21 years ago the Channel launched.
I was born too late for Channel 4's launch and as a 90s kid with no Sky or cable this was my first opportunity to see a channel launch, even in grainy picture quality.
Whether it was because I was a kid at the time or something new, the channel appealed to me as something fresh and different from the stuffy and sometimes old fashioned programmes, presentation and continuity seen on the other terrestrial networks.
I loved most of the launch schedule and spent a lot of time watching the channel, especially at the weekend.
As a family we quickly got into the gameshows and family affairs. The gameshows, whilst looking cheap these days provided tea time entertainment (a model that both the BBC and ITV follow nowadays) and a soap that felt homely, tackling important subjects from one family's point of view.
5 News was brilliant at launch, especially the hourly updates, the newsroom setting was incredible, along with the bold look and the music it gave a sense of urgency with a fast pace.
The continuity announcers were brilliantly talented, especially how most of the time they arranged their speech around the 'five' spoken audio in the idents. The idents themselves were very different to what we'd seen before, stylish, colourful and designed to suit every style of programme. The layered logo with the square, circle and 5 numeral worked very well in my opinion, and whilst the idents were different for varying dramas, they all had a uniformed way of displaying the logo and had varying versions of the audio.
A tiny thing that I loved was that the DOG/BUG/logo/whatever people refer to them as these days had the lovely animated bar that slid out at the end of a part of a programme/start of the next.
It's a shame that they became known as the channel with the three Fs at the time, but at the end of the day it got them talked about; unfortunately they felt that they had to change their identity severely to move forward as a channel. To me they should have stuck with their original plan and developed it. When schedule pieces were dropped, family affairs had the massive change and the news moved away from their newsroom setting things started to change for the worse in my opinion. I was definitely watching less of the channel by 2002/03 time.
Over time the various companies and rebrands have tailored it in different ways and I now feel that Viacom is getting the balance right, pushing it in the right direction.
With past multiple different owners they most probably will never look back on the past of the channel, but with the help of YouTube and our own grey matter, we can share memories. For a small company at launch they definitely made an impact on the looks of presentation (channel & news) and the style of schedule that would be copied by many broadcaster from that point onwards.
I was born too late for Channel 4's launch and as a 90s kid with no Sky or cable this was my first opportunity to see a channel launch, even in grainy picture quality.
Whether it was because I was a kid at the time or something new, the channel appealed to me as something fresh and different from the stuffy and sometimes old fashioned programmes, presentation and continuity seen on the other terrestrial networks.
I loved most of the launch schedule and spent a lot of time watching the channel, especially at the weekend.
As a family we quickly got into the gameshows and family affairs. The gameshows, whilst looking cheap these days provided tea time entertainment (a model that both the BBC and ITV follow nowadays) and a soap that felt homely, tackling important subjects from one family's point of view.
5 News was brilliant at launch, especially the hourly updates, the newsroom setting was incredible, along with the bold look and the music it gave a sense of urgency with a fast pace.
The continuity announcers were brilliantly talented, especially how most of the time they arranged their speech around the 'five' spoken audio in the idents. The idents themselves were very different to what we'd seen before, stylish, colourful and designed to suit every style of programme. The layered logo with the square, circle and 5 numeral worked very well in my opinion, and whilst the idents were different for varying dramas, they all had a uniformed way of displaying the logo and had varying versions of the audio.
A tiny thing that I loved was that the DOG/BUG/logo/whatever people refer to them as these days had the lovely animated bar that slid out at the end of a part of a programme/start of the next.
It's a shame that they became known as the channel with the three Fs at the time, but at the end of the day it got them talked about; unfortunately they felt that they had to change their identity severely to move forward as a channel. To me they should have stuck with their original plan and developed it. When schedule pieces were dropped, family affairs had the massive change and the news moved away from their newsroom setting things started to change for the worse in my opinion. I was definitely watching less of the channel by 2002/03 time.
Over time the various companies and rebrands have tailored it in different ways and I now feel that Viacom is getting the balance right, pushing it in the right direction.
With past multiple different owners they most probably will never look back on the past of the channel, but with the help of YouTube and our own grey matter, we can share memories. For a small company at launch they definitely made an impact on the looks of presentation (channel & news) and the style of schedule that would be copied by many broadcaster from that point onwards.