The day ITV changed forever...

There's no chance they closed all their studios and only retained the very few.

The bigger question of all is this: HAS the back office operations at last been merged into a single operation? Leed, LWT and Granada were all sperate who dislike each other. I believe a federal system is still in place to this day!

I don't see how it couldn't be, that's the main cost saving of any merger after all. Like any company they're bound to have some local HR and finance staff around their offices

It's in no way a 'federal' company

30 years ago, this was the sort of music that branded your channel. Why do I bring it up? Because 30 years later, I remember it well because it is so imprinted on my memory.

For those that don't recognise it, it is the music that accompanied Central's 3D cake animations in its continuity in the early 80s.

Wasn't that used for Children's ITV for a while too?

Yes it was, I should say that and the whole first batch of music all come from Bruton library? This continued until 1989? when it was updated with new in house stuff. The presentation at central put every other company to shame, even putting LWT into second place. If you see the videos which pop up on the net you will see the amount of presentation the pres department created, over 10'000 or was its 100'000 piece from 1985 - 1998.

It must be almost impossible to count. Central often mixed and matched various aspects of presentation too. The same visual ident could have different music variants, promos could recycle different previously used animations.

It's funny to think that the cake wasn't really around that long. It first appeared in it's matured abstract form in 1986 and was gone in 1998; so 12 years. That's how long we've had regionless ITV continuity and that still feels like a recent development to me. The fast-paced, ever-changing presentation gives an impression that decades passed during the Central cake's tenure.

Here, aparrently, is a complete side of a Central laserdisc from the 90s... Just goes to show how many items they had in their armoury at the time...

Cake was 85

God Central's jingles were naff as hell at times

Lets be fair here that just 91-93! the first 36mins

I think you first have to consider it was over 20 years ago but also that Central's presentation style was to immediately talk over any ident or aston rather than let it play out with just music. That's why the changed the music on the 1989 generic ITV ident which was designed to be played out in full before the CA spoke. The Central music worked well enough with that sort of continuity style.