ITV's 60th Birthday

Wasn't Sue a panda bear?

Soo was, indeed, a panda. She also won an edition of The Weakest Link a few years back. And once she pretended to be pregnant and poor Sooty got the blame for it.

That's all the Soo trivia for today.

Current voice of sue the one we all love was dropped in 2001? with the series was overhauled. This was when Hit controlled it and ruined it. All ended well when hit sold it on because it was making no money and current owned brought everything and got the voice back to sue as it should be,

The 2001 series was Brenda Longman voicing Soo, and then it changed the next series. I know these links are from Wikipedia but they are correct in this case
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soo_(puppet)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sooty_(TV_series)

As a side note, the 2001 series was excellent, but 2002 not so. I had video recorded the entire 2001 series, intended to do the same in 2002 but didn't bother after the first episode. Thankfully the tv series has been revived to a very high standard - with lots of nice touches from the past. CITV are to be commended for commissioning the revival

Sooty was never the same after Thames lost their franchise and it became Sooty and Co

Sooty was the very first thing I happened to catch on TV broadcast in Nicam stereo. Reckon that was about 1990. Seeing the little Nicam lamp illuminated for the first time was ridiculously exciting. This was via Granada, and before the BBC broadcast anything in stereo ISTR.

We got our first NICAM TV in 1992, I remember that one having a red NICAM lamp on it too- I don't remember it ever not being lit though (unless we were using the VCR or Mega Drive anyway). I guess by then they just left the NICAM signal on all the time, even on mono programmes.

Yes, I think once the Nicam signal was being broadcast, all broadcasters in the UK elected to transmit it all the time, whether programmes themselves originated in stereo or mono. The Nicam system was capable of dual-mono broadcasts and TVs at the time had indicators to show that was being transmitted. I believe the idea was for bilingual programming and the viewer could select (for example) Welsh or English. I don't recall this ever being used in the UK. Was it ever used elsewhere?

Or is memory playing tricks? I now have vague recollections of the new evening line up introduced by the COW symbol being heralded as the launch of Nicam on the BBC. So presumably the first programme was Wogan... As I lived in the north west at the time, I assume BBC Nicam launched in the South East via Crystal Palace...

From what I've seen the BBC didn't officially launch NICAM until the summer of 1991 (though they had been broadcasting plenty, unadvertised, before then).

One of the first NICAM broadcasts was an episode of IBA Engineering Announcements from selected transmitters- I think that meant CP and Emley

Remember that ending music? Aw, that was nice!