Children's BBC in the past

Quite a bit of Milkshake is UK produced isn't it?

Completely forgot about that aswell, my point kinda stands as anyone over age 7 does not get much home grown productions which is a shame.
at least the MR men is re-dub with uk accents and terms

We import so much programming, and yet arguably the best import we could possibly have has been off air for around a decade - Sesame Street.

The decline of CITV is nothing short of remarkable; from being an equal/superior to CBBC (afternoons at least) in 2000 to being essentially nothing by 2006. And all without intervention from Ofcom!

You may find this of interest. A few years ago I did some research and produced a history of BBC Watch With Mother and See-Saw. Following the synopsis there is an A-Z listing of the programmes in two sections. First the programmes of Watch With Mother & See Saw followed by the non See-Saw Programmes from 1985 shown on BBC-1 at 3.50pm or 4.10pm and programmes transferred to the CBBC lunchtime slot on BBC-2 from 1989.
Here's the link: -
http://www.zen77094.zen.co.uk/vintagebroadcasting/wwm.htm

It is quite amazing how much drama and comedy/drama used to be made for Children's TV, and how much of it was good quality, with a decent budget.

Besides the staples of Grange Hill and Byker Grove, they'd often have a good quality multi-episode drama or sitcom at 4.35 and a 5.10 on CBBC most days. CITV would have one at 4:40 as well.

I presume it all just went out of fashion when the likes of Nickelodeon came along, their american sitcoms seemed much 'cooler'

On a completely different point, I did like how they used to show an ident before Newsround to try and be a bit formal. I don't know when that stopped.

Sorry to jump forward in time, but I'm still curious about CBBC Choice. Was it ever actually advertised on CBBC One and CBBC Two? I seem to recall that CBBC on Choice was never mentioned and there was never any promos for it, but when the CBBC Channel launched they made sure you knew about it, especially at the end of the day.

I remember watching Choice a lot before the 2000 revamp, because they had a lot of cheaply-made but quite interesting programming. They did put out some really good stuff, such as the Doctor Who 35th Anniversary programming late in 1998 with Sylvester McCoy. That was a nice little exclusive. It's a shame they didn't expand on the original idea of Choice, I'm sure it would have been popular today.

Just found this tour of Studio 9 under construction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4Yei59MzMo&feature=related

It seems to have been fitted with Widescreen stuff?

It was widescreen ready from the start, IIRC. They just didn't broadcast until late 2001.

In fact what confuses me is the fact all 1997-2001 CBBC idents were made in widescreen, but the sped up variants used from late 2001 to early 2002 seem to be cropped versions of the previous idents, even though they were in widescreen in the first place.

Possibly mentioned briefly, but not heavily trailed. I'm pretty sure that Dog and Dinosaur (CBBC Choice's main programme) got trailed either on the Saturday morning show or on Friday afternoon. Back then of course the BBC had a lot of split promos so any proper promotions would only have been shown on BBC One and Two digital


Yes, as I mentioned in the other thread, CBBC on Choice was very low key: http://www.tvforum.co.uk/forums/post703237#post-703237

Yes, again as I mentioned in the other thread it was built widescreen switchable but for the first few years it was only used that way for pre-recording links once the widescreen playout areas started to take over the airtime.

I totally agree, the original Choice format simply wasn't given anything like enough time to develop. Insisting that it only went out on Digital (unlike News 24 which also went on analogue cable) was a bizarre decision which further stunted the channel. The Beeb's expectations just seemed ridiculous - hell in 2000 there was still plenty of Sky Analogue subscribers, leave alone NTL, Telewest & C&W which had barely begun rolling out Digital and then the number of people waiting for DTT to go live on their transmitter.

It was far too early to judge.

Were they really made in widescreen? I guess they may not have had access to them four years on - and in any case there was a lot of stylistic zooming in and zooming out going on (and cutting between different idents) so it wasn't all that noticeable. I think to be honest they probably hoped the CBBC and CBeebies channels would have been launching late 2001 so they could go widescreen and get a new look at the same time, but the government really dragged their heels on approving the plans so you ended up with that slight refresh which only lasted 5 months.

It was also September 2001 when the programmes starting being split into "younger kids" and "older kids" in preparation, with different idents and presenting styles to match, which supports that theory...