I'm hoping they'll use the rebrand to inject a bit of personality into their announcements into the programmes as well. The current lot are blandness personified.
There used to be a time on here where announcers enjoyed the same 'celebrity' status as newsreaders, presenters etc. Does anyone actually know who the current ITV announcers are ? I couldn't tell you. All I know is they are no equivalents of Trish Bertram or Dame Maggie Mash amongst them.
they are definietly not Colin Weston or Andrew Brittain!!!
Those colours just make me think Channel 5 in 1997. Whilst I liked early era Channel 5 (before they started putting the likes of Keith Chegwin on the idents), I hope ITV don't so down that route.
I hated the celebrity idents. Yes, because they signalled the death of the traditional station names, that will have prejudiced me somewhat (lots of Midlanders insist that the Carlton star idents were horrible because they killed off the Central identity, despite me thinking they were fantastic) but I honestly just hate people idents. Cartlon's launch idents were as bad. The generic celebrityless one was a bit of a gem but was only ever shown before news.
Continuity-wise though, it was actually an improvement for the north of England. I see Maggie Mash was mentioned but the Leeds-based continuity for Granada was, most of the time, dreadful. Although the continuity suite was designed to be able to give dedicated continuity to at least three feeds (Yorkshire/Tyne Tees,/Granada), albeit two would have to be pre-recorded, it rarely happened in practice unless the three regions were showing separate programmes. So what you ended up with was generic announcements never mentioning the name of the channel. Although there are examples of it on the internet, "ITV" was used only occassionally. Sometimes "this is ITV at the heart of your region" was heard, "here", "on this channel" or "on this side of the fence" when cross-promoting what was on ITV2. Granada didn't even get its own unique local ident which both Yorkshire & Tyne Tees got; something I still don't understand to this day. Instead, Granada just got the standard hearts ident which, whilst not a legendary ident package, was rather fresh back in 1999, yet they managed to run it down. It got worse when Border became a full time responsibility and the rename of ITV1 just made the idents look stupid and knowing they were on borrowed time, the Leeds presentation and continuity department just seemed to give up making an effort. That is until around Autumn time in 2002 when Granada seemed to get a lot more dedicated continuity. I remember watching it one evening in either September or October and "Granada" being namechecked on most junctions, despite it going into a network programmed. Although I was none the wise, perhaps the continuity team were trying to demonstrate that they could actually do dedicated continuity and to make a point about their impending redundancy. Like I said, I hated the celebtrity idents, but the continuity was bright and, at least, was allowed to say "Now on ITV 1".