I have always wondered what got fellow members interested in Television. For me, it was a couple of years ago when I was randomly typing in television theme tunes, and on the recommended videos it came up with all sorts of videos of GMTV opt-out problems. After watching a fair few videos, I just became deeply interested with Television. Anyhow, I really look forward to hearing how you did too..
Watching Schools programmes for 6 weeks at my elderly neighbour's house (just had an operation) and just being fascinated by the BBC2/C4 Schools Idents and slides I didn't know the technological terms at the time just called it watching Schools programmes! (Which then started an obsession of recording them and playing back once I got back from school)
TV itself - well, it's always been there so can't think of anything specific. Remember watching CBBC at 1.20pm on BBC2, with the childrens shows on ITV at 12.10pm back in the 80s.
As for TV presentation I think it would be the ITV regions which got me interested. Lived in an area which got a different region on each TV in the house so we had HTV, Granada, S4C and Central - and Central of course was leagues ahead of HTV and Granada when it came to their presentation.
I think it started with my love of the 1999-2001 CiTV branding. The studio, logo, idents and programming of the era were all brilliant (although I'm sure everyone would say that about their own era of children's TV). The first website I visited was www.citv.co.uk, which itv.com/citv still redirected to until last year or so. I've been told I would 'sing' the jingle in school.
I echo VMPhil's points - the branding of CITV at that point was brilliant. That era got me interested in the live TV side of things too, especially when they had in vision continuity, SM:TV Live, Mad for It! & The Top Ten of Everything all live on CITV. It's a shame things didn't remain like that.
I always enjoyed the presentation of CITV & CBBC throughout the 90's, and enjoyed the behind the scenes articles on programmes such as Live & Kicking and Blue Peter that occasionally cropped up. I remember a V.T. on Blue Peter that Konnie did following the process of the 1999 makeover that liked the complete package and showed how much went on.
Ident wise, bar CITV, CBBC & the various Saturday morning titles (if we can count them - but I don't care what anybody says, Live & Kicking's titles were a brilliant piece of art), I like Brekkie remember Central being leaps & bounds above the others, but used to enjoy the days of going on holidays in this country to see the different ITV regions (it may sound strange to younger members, but it appealed to me).
Back in the 90's as a child before the likes of multi channel bothered us all, I loved the BBC 1 mid trailer stings, the BBC 2's, Central's idents, and of course Channel 4 who seemed quite radical back in the day when they went for the pale circles design, especially having the cameras in the VT booths bringing back in vision continuity - something that I don't remember from the 80's. This all led to me loving the hype around Channel 5, watching preview films on a 14" portable showing a very grainy pictures, but for me it was the first new channel launch that I would have witnessed, and most probably the biggest that I will see with channels coming & going as they do these days. I loved the early bright, totally different presentation, and even content.
To sum up presentation of the 90's, children's presentation, the launch of channel 5, and the Big Breakfast to a certain extent too.
Yes, The Big Breakfast certainly made TV interesting and it was probably the first non-childrens show I was really a big fan of - and it was a show that despite airing daily constantly evolved to and just had so much love put into it. The buzz of Saturday morning TV is much missed too - and indeed live TV in general. Maybe it's because I was a kid or maybe it's because TV had much more freedom then but live TV used to genuinely feel like anything could happen - nowadays it's scripted to within an inch of it's life with anything remotely questionable pre-recorded. TV was just more interesting back then too - you could see many genres of shows across one channel over a single day - nowadays it seems we have multiple channels all showing pretty much the same thing.
Big Brother got me interested in the more business/formats side of TV - before that I was quite naïve and kind of assumed everything that aired here was thought of here and foreign TV only ever showed the stuff that we saw on Tarrants on TV. Found it quite interesting how BB varied around the world and was very much tailored to each country in a similar way I guess to how the ITV regions were tailored to their local area back in the day. Most of big formats are little more than carbon copies of each other around the world - and sadly with the BB revival of late in many countries which have had it, dropped it and revived it it is now much more an off the shelf one size fits all approach.
From a Pres point of view? If I had to pick a turning point, then the look of BBC 2 in the 1990s kick-started it. That was great all-round, but the idents especially stood out from others; unique, varied and well-filmed sequences with their own moods - not just something that indicated what channel you were tuned to, not an afterthought to the programmes.
I'd seen the era prior to then and had never thought of Presentation as having much impact (though C4 seemed the best of the bunch) or great artistic merit... But it really hit form in the following years - and I was actively keeping a bit of a lookout circa 1995.
Also was interesting to witness things go wrong or see something that you weren't supposed to... Breakdowns, VT Clocks etc. And on easy going days would delve into the various Teletext pages - I sort of miss that.
I think changes in life got in the way for a while after, as happens. About a decade ago I decided to pick up again out of sheer interest; I searched about the Presentation aspect online, and it went from there.
Probably showing my age here, but I remember seeing an ITN news report about the 3 new ITV franchises going on air (Central, TSW and TVS) and being totally transfixed by their animated idents. Then of course came the launch of Channel 4 with its great logo and theme music, and later TV-am.
I still think of it as being a golden age of UK television
I didn't know the technological terms at the time just called it watching Schools programmes! (Which then started an obsession of recording them and playing back once I got back from school)
