CITV at Gas Street

The promos for the website made it look so amazing, that I asked to go on the internet for the first time to see what it was all about. So it was the first website I ever visited! Remember the Flash games where you could play as one of the presenters?

Yeah growing up watching CiTV was great from 1998 on wards, when they first moved into the bigger set it looked great but by the time Michael and Leah was hosting it the studio and presentation was a bit mix matched and the last white set was to bland for me and the jingle just screamed "Fairy Liquid" to me

Completely agree. I always though the initial idents were a bit unfinished, with the white background and uninspired animation. It wasn’t that long before the light blue look turned up, was it?

And I don’t think I’d ever seen that final look (unsurprisingly given I was well out the target range!) but I’d always thought invision had ended with the dark blue set.

It really was a great era of kids TV and although it’s really nice to see live continuity is still important at the BBC, we’ll never again have the studios and presenters on both channels like there was in the late 90s.

Still remember them doing a credit roll whenever they had a popstar doing a song on a Friday though!

The final one I always refer to as the polystyrene set!

2 minute warning!

I'd say my favourite year of the Gas Street era was 2000. I remember it vividly. The jingles have always stuck in my mind, there were some great shows on. The presenters genuinely looked like they were having a good time.

The final Gas Street link in 2004 was on Youtube some time ago but it's since disappeared. IIRC Andy Jaye said something along the lines of "From our studios in Birmingham, goodbye".

Really interesting to see how many presenters made it on air that had absolutely zero star quality.

Stephen, Danielle and Michael Underwood all stand out as effortless, charismatic presenters.

And then you have Arthur Darvill and Tim Dixon. Who put them on air?!

When I think of CiTV, I always think of Danielle, Stephen and Leah.

There is an ident of CiTV I could never find online. I’m not exactly sure what year it was, but it was somewhere between 2001 - 2002, and it was a vairation of the usual blue ident. It wasn’t the dark or very light one, but somewhere in between. It also wasn’t the spider ident.

It's not this look is it - introduced after the dark blue set around 2002.

Not quite, but very similar. The background did not have any black in it, and IIRC, the formup of the logo was very bubbly.

This look was brought in with the set change to include the metal and neon (I was not a fan myself) to coincide with the launch of the CBBC Channel in February 2002. By the summer the animated letter break stings were introduced. WM, the bubbly ident was introduced when the animated letters came along. For the tots programmes they kept the same animation from earlier in 2002, and oddly kept the out of place audio from the weekend roller coaster ident.


(From 0:19)

The dark set looked out of place with the animated character idents which opted for a lighter blue background.

The 2004 CITV set which weirdly enough is in the same studios as Central News...