CITV at Gas Street

I remember being very excited when on the Friday before hand they crashed through the screen and I'm sure that Stephen and Dannielle were stood with the CITV town model around them.

Thinking about it, would the original studio space have been used to film the CITV town sections?

There was the final IVC link from CITV in Birmingham on You Tube a few years back. I can't seem to find it anywhere now but the presenter did take the time to say that it was an end of an era.

Yeah, there was a great YT channel with tons of early-00s CiTV on it, including plenty of that final look and the very last link. It was all taken down some years ago now, which is a great shame.

The final presenter was Andy Jay, who now works as a motorsport presenter and was an outside bet for the C4 F1 gig.

That final look was quite sad really, as the continuity had been so big and bold and then almost overnight it was reduced to one man, a puppet and a very cheap looking set. Of course, it really wasn’t long until IVC went altogether.

Man, whatever happened to that upload of the CITV laserdisc? It had so much stuff on. And the Central one too.

It's a shame, cos as a kid I always preferred IVC, felt so much better than out of vision. Doubly so when said OOV is pre-recorded. Pretty much every kids slot/channel apart from Cartoon Network has done IVC at one time or another (and even CN's had periods of live continuity with real-time animation), now it's only CBBC, Cbeebies and Milkshake that still do it.

Not by 1998 standards. That CITV dog was massive compared to the later smaller version.

It is a shame. I loved growing up with IVC early 90s on CITV & then solely on CBBC until the 1998 relaunch. I enjoyed Milkshake's original live continuity too with Lucy Alexander, Konnie Huq and Eddie Matthews, then with the launch of T4 in October 1998, it seemed to be that everyone was doing it, and things felt so much better for it - in my opinion. I didn't get sky in January 2002, so (albeit a little old, possibly) enjoyed the IVC on Nickelodeon, with Nick L8R and Disney Channel's Studio Disney. I remember thinking that Studio Disney felt like such a big show, a bit like a Saturday morning show, every afternoon.

I presume over the years, the restrictions in budgets due to the junk food advertising ban and the reduction in live viewers due to an increase in on demand hasn't helped this.

For CITV, it's not only the lack of IVC, but the lack of original programming that has suffered. I know that the old ITV block relied a lot on Nick & CN shows plus Pokémon and Digimon around their original shows, but the originals were of high quality and very entertaining. The quiz shows and factual programmes were very well produced and provided something that you don't get these days.
I'm sure that I'd watch new versions of Fun House, Art Attack and How 2 if they aired somewhere today!

All three show run via stv. It Would make them very happy if itv brought them back.

I agree some orignal kids shows would be great. Most recent were horrid Henry and s4 Mr bean animated series.

How 2 would be great start... Why not rerun chirldrens ward and dramarama and see if the kids like it?

I should point out that Thunderbirds are go continues to be an excellent production for CITV.



Unfortunately it would look very out of place, especially the quality of the programme these days.

Maybe if CITV went 24 hours they could do retro shows in the evenings when they'd expect nostalgic adults to watch instead of kids. But yeah, kids today aren't used to that kind of show any more, they would be out of place.

Who says kids today wouldn't like it?

Nickelodeon US does this with a block (via the TeenNick channel) called 'Nick Splat':