CiTV Presentation

All that pres in the clip above is why I used to set my alarm for specifically 9:24 on a Saturday.

GMTV always used to run a really long ad break at that time, I'm sure it used to be 5 minutes long, which is longer than allowed I though, unless as it technically was before the station closed down, they could have a break as long as they wanted. GMTV obviously also wouldn't care about retaining the audience waiting around over such a long break.

I remember discussions here about GMTV getting their hours back following sport disruption, and it wasn't always as obvious as you'd think. Although they'd generally just extend Sunday morning kids stuff for more hours, sometimes even until lunchtime, I think on occasion there were just too many hours to make up.

I believe they had on at least one occasion a slot on Sunday afternoon during some children's films or something, where the only way we decided it was GMTV hours was because there were no ITV breakbumpers.

There were certainly times we had GMTV studio output past 9:25 though- always strange seeing their clock showing times after 10:00!

Yes, very strange really- I'm suprised they didn't extend the time to 9:30 with the 1992 franchise round- would have made sense. IIRC the 9:25 time was to allow the ITV companies to run their start-up before the first programme at 9:30. Though as startups vanished quite quickly after TV-am launched, it's been an irrelevancy since the mid-80s!



And I remember the Diggit/Diggin' It way of doing it instead was to scroll the credits across the bottom of the screen in the closing months of the show. Strangely, I remember CITV doing that at some point they showed the 101 dalmatians cartoon- although in their own style, though they never did it for anything else.

Also the last few years of the Disney Club were strange- as they intoduced kid presenters, scripted scenes and all the kids had their own fake names- for example "Des"'s real name was Paul, and Reggie Yates was called Robbie. Fearne Cotton used her own name, but then I think she became the presenter as a result of an open contest (which Diggit then repeated a while afterwards!).

Well, yeah, and there were plenty of old kids shows around at that time too, from the seventies and eighties, but the thing about Wacaday was that it was so much of a live programme and so much of it was based around viewer interaction and letters and current pop music that it made virtually no sense at all. It would have been like repeating an episode of Going Live or Live and Kicking five years later, there was so little repeat value in it. Clearly TVam didn't care what they were showing in their last few months on air. And because it was a daily show that TVam were repeating weekly, they used to chop a Gobots ("go botty!") cartoon into five parts and strip it through the week, so in 1992 it took five weeks to see one episode.

I remember the long last ad break on TVam was sometimes home to really, really long "adverts" that weren't adverts but more corporate videos, often aimed entirely at the company's staff, and as Morning Glory by Ian Jones points out, that was because TVam offered special discounts to advertisers to make special messages to their staff, because they were so desperate for revenue. Have never found any examples of these online, though.

just to point out Wacday was live during the xmas holidays. IF TVAM was smarter there could have had the best of Wacaday.

I think during periods when they reclaimed time from F1 it wasn't uncommon you probably saw the GMTV clock past 9.25am. I remember once (I think it was Mother's Day) and they dragged Lorraine Kelly in to present a whole show, and I'm sure it was on until about 11.30!

They had a spell around 1998 when GMTV took an ad break as they did that finished at around 9.24, they then carried on until 9.26 or so, and then handed over directly to Richard and Judy for a preview of This Morning which ran nicely to 9.30. But this didn't last very long at all.

I'm amazed that even in 2015 we still have a blip in the picture on ITV at 9.25am, that's a legacy for you.

Really? I thought that ended with the demise of TV-am? With GMTV going through the regional companies to enable regional news, that blip was eliminated. (NI and Scotland excluded, for a time when other companies did the regional bits).

Not a TV-am blip (by which I mean a proper judder) by all means, the last I checked you see and hear the smallest of blips.

There was definately still TV-am esque picture roll at the switch here (Yorkshire TV/Emley Moor) well into the 90s, and even into the 00s there was a glitch in the picture. Even now you get a second or two of black screen around the switch.

That Firework Saturday morning CITV ident was fantastic, instant nostalgia for Saturday mornings in the late 90s whenever I see it. It really captured the energy and rawness of what followed.

I think the "spiky" design of the logo is supposed to be a heavily stylised sun (for CITV in the morning). Because it was only ever used for that one junction, it was different and special.

It was a better time.

I think the 3.5 minute limit only applies to breaks within programmes. Channels can certainly run unlimited promos between programmes.


I quite like that 9.25am remains as a legacy of ITV's past - I don't know why but 9.30 seems an even more awkward time too me. That said I always found it strange that ITV commissioned Jeremy Kyle as a 65 minute then included the news in This Morning at 10.55am rather than airing it at 10.25am between the two.


Anyway - off topic but to get it back on topic did CITV used to air at 9.25am on weekdays during the holidays. Almost certainly did at Christmas, but what about the summer and half term. I'm sure it did but might even have ended before the 1998 era began.

Yep - here's a CiTV from Bank Holiday Monday in May 2001, starting immediately after GMTV.