Happy 20th Birthday Channel Five

Yes, moving from the newsroom to a rather stark white set didn't do it any favours, though I would say it did cling on to it's initial feeling a bit longer. It was when they changed the music in the "five" era it seemed a rather confused mess.

I do think losing the hourly bulletins was possibly a bigger loss than losing the main bulletin might have been. Initially as well as providing a fairly unique service (in primetime at least, at that point the BBC and ITV had regular daytime bulletins) I guess the updates also did act as an hourly advert for the news service - and I'm not sure it would have made the mark it did without them. They were also clever enough to schedule them at around the :58 mark rather than on the hour, meaning they'd catch people channel hopping in between shows. Yes, they might hop back a couple of minutes later but it did mean 5 News was able to reach a wider audience than it might have done otherwise.

There still bulletins at 19.58 and 20.58 each weeknight.

Managed to dig out a recording from 2003 (borrowed from the missus - although we coincidentally and totally independently both recorded the same show back then, mine were all from digital and hers were from analogue), and it looks like the 5 ancillary service provided by Intelfax did indeed continue once Teletext Ltd had taken over running the main service. Apparently it was also still alive and well after they'd rebranded to 'five'. Although by this point it no longer had any appearance of an integrated service like the earlier days of (5)Text had been, with it all just gaining very much the same visual split as had been the case on ITV or Channel 4 for years.

I recall one thing. Channel 5 used to have classifications for movies and they were unique. They're not like the Sky movie channels that use the BBFC classifications. Other stations use verbal warnings like "contains strong language".

All images from TV Live:














There are at least four classifications: Universal, Guidance, Caution and Adult.

I remember being a little confused when a lot of the visuals that appeared in that test transmission (all the stripes stuff like the xylophone and the test tubes) was nowhere to be seen when the channel launched. I think at the time I assumed they were idents that were dropped and replaced prior to launch but I'm not so sure now.

There was a different version of the logo that appeared on much of the early publicity, so at least there were some changes made to the branding not too far away from launch:

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/logopedia/images/7/79/Channel_5_pre-launch.png/revision/latest?cb=20160128210530

Yes I remember getting that logo on an A5 "Give me 5" flyer about retuning.

I note looking down the transmitter lists Channel 5 on analogue TV was also never broadcast from Sutton Coldfield, it instead came from Litchfield. Surprisingly even Crystal Palace didn't have Channel 5 on analogue, I understand that came from Croydon.

I presume a lot of this was because of the way Channel 5 was slotted into the UHF band often on Channel 37. Clashes with home video recorders notwithstanding, this means the viewer numbers were restricted, I seem to remember only 65% of homes could get Channel 5 on analogue and that was one of the main reasons why they launched on satellite soon after.

You're right, although we had the VCR retune people come round well in advance of it launching, Lichfield was particularly difficult to pick up in Wolverhampton. We had to wait for it to arrive on Wrekin some months later.

It was more to do with being cheap. Back then the ex-BBC and ex-IBA transmitters were owned by different companies. It was cheaper for ntl to use Croydon (which they owned) than Crystal Palace (which they didn't). Pontop and Sutton are both ex-BBC sites.

In London it wasn't too big an issue, the two sites are a mile apart so an aerial pointing at one gets a usable signal from the other unless you're very close - and if you are close a bit of wet string will probably work as an aerial anyway. So much so that Croydon had (and may still have) backup transmitters that can be put on air if Crystal Palace goes down for any reason.

That was the case until quite recently wasn't it? The former BBC ones being Crown Castle and IBA ones being Arquiva. It's quite recent it all came under the same ownership.

Yes, Arqiva bought NTL which was what the IBA transmission dept was privatised as.

BBC sold theirs to Crown Castle, which became National Grid Wireless and was eventually bought out by Arqiva.

Wasn't there a story that Channel 5 initially commissioned a design agency to do the pre-launch publicity and branding, but liked it so much that they decided to carry it over as the launch identity. Which is why the final logo didn't look much different from that initial logo