CiTV Presentation

On plenty of shows from the 70s and 80s the cue dots were actually recorded onto the tapes- quite often you see them on repeats and DVD releases of shows. Watch an episode of pretty much any 70s ITV sitcom for example! It was only really later on (late 90s onwards) once automation took over that cue dots only really tended to appear on live shows.

Once things were automated and the length of a pre-recorded show's part was known, there wasn't really any need for cue dots to signal breaks, whereas live shows can be of indeterminate length.

And indeed there's no way that Scratchy & Co was ever live! Tricky & Mashed were though. I think Scratchy & Co might actually be the only 90s Saturday morning show that wasn't live (though I think Parallel 9 had recorded inserts, and the 1996-99 Sunday morning Fully Booked was recorded too, though the 1995 Saturday series was live).

Actually thinking about it, I think Telegantic Megavision was pre-recorded too. But nobody remembers that.

Yep, Tricky, I'm pretty sure that was done live (even though it was animated).

I remember a preview (about a week before it started) of SMTV listing its title as "/SM:TV//live" or something equally ridiculous and Internet-y. I wonder if they had a last minute rethink on its theming? Obviously the colon remained.

Significantly less sophisticated animation than CBBC were using for Ratz several years earlier, so quite easy to pull off live I imagine.



Was a thing at the time, Hale & Pace had a show called h&p@bbc. (the full stop being part of the title!) and Iceland rebranded itself as iceland.co.uk for about 18 months. All seems ridiculously stupid and dated now of course!

I'm sure it was actually SMTV://live as well, so it looked like the http:// part of a web address. That's what Wikipedia says anyway!

Yep I think that was it - I typed it out loads of ways but it didn't look right!

Similarly the BBC decided around this time (May/June 2000 IIRC) that it would be a good idea to put the 'www.bbc.co.uk' address permanently on their idents. Because, you know, that's a hard one to remember!

It was peramantly on-screen on BBC News 24 for a good year or so as well.

Although at the same time random programmes would advertise their pages on beeb.com

To be fair ITV and Channel 4 followed, with Channel 4's being the least obtrusive and ITV's the most. Remember that flashing ITV.com animation on the bottom of the idents? I only point out the BBC because I still think it looks a bit messy with the URL above it (especially when you look at idents for the regions where there's three lines of text on screen).

The ITV.com logo looked fine in comparison to the g-wizz.net URLs that appeared on the Granada channels.

Telegantic Megavision, bloody hell that was rubbish! I'd be very surprised if there's any clips of that, especially since it was going up against Live and Kicking, which had about 3 million odd ratings around that point.

EDIT: There seems to be a surprising abundance of it on YouTube, and it's worse than I remember it.

Also that intro looks a lot like What's Up Doc's.

Get ready to be surprised:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Telegantic+Megavision%2C

Telegantic Megavision was just a cheap filler for the slot while the STV produced show It's Not Just Saturday filled the other half from 10.30am

Looks like the sort of show I (and I suspect many others here) should have really enjoyed back in the mid-90s but I don't remember it at all.