ITV Franchise Logo Plastering

The recent discussion in the Disney+ thread reminded me to make this.

Generally, the ITV companies' track records of preserving the logos on the original broadcast are a mixed bag, the ITV3 repeats of Classic Corrie since 2017 contain all the Granada logos from broadcast, however, I noticed certain episodes from September 6th, 1989 to June 29th, 1990 flip-flopped between the classic 1968-1990 Granada logo and the 1989-1990 yellow G-arrow on purple gradient endboard, featuring the new ITV corporate logo, until the new blue banner logo was introduced on June 4th, 1990.

Pearson Television, the owner of the Thames catalogue in the late 90's up until the dawn of the millennium, had a very strange record of reverse-plastering shows produced after September 1989 with the 1969 Salute on Thames ident, (the 1976 variant) at the beginning of each programme, sometimes they'd even remove the original endboards. This slowed down after Pearson sold it's television arm to RTL Group in 2000, and became branded under FremantleMedia in August 2001, with some of the "lost" logos quietly restored.

Carlton had the same tatic as Fremantle today: preserving the logos and endboards of any of their acquired assets: (ITC, Central, Westcountry), followed by the "Distributed by Carlton International" endcap: a wise decision from a generally detested ITV franchise.

Anybody else know of other logo plasters within the ITV companies?

What is a "logo plaster"?

ITV plc/ ITV Studios are very good at covering up old endcaps and frontcaps and whatever else, and pretending they existed in 1986, or whatever.

The new prints for Strike It Lucky Series 4 on Challenge have an entirely new Fremantle end cap on them which also has its own sound sting too. The previous version didn't have these. But they were removing Thames frontcaps for a while as well at one stage.

I think it may be luck of the draw as to who gets what. When Big Centre TV bought a shed load of Crossroads episodes (and then didn't air most of them but we won't talk about that) the ATV Zoom 2 ident was replaced with ITV Studios. But the endcap wasn't, and in fact it wasn't consistent IIRC across the episodes they did air. Some had ATV Zoom 2 and an ITV Studios encap, some weren't changed at all and some had an ATV endcap and an ITV Studios one.

It's a practice film and television companies do on either acquired assets or their own, either to replace their older logos with the latest ones, or replace the logo of a former company with their own to "avoid confusion".

ITV have also been editing end credits, and in some cases completely recreating them, so that the copyright is changed from the original company to ITV Studios, with the original date. This has been happening with programmes shown on ITV3 for a while now.

Sometimes it was done so ITV could do a standard ECP with it, rather than an out of proportion squeeze. And also so they didn't run for hours on end like originally.

Ah, logo replacement, got you.

That's done on the shows that have been remastered in HD (as they had to create entirely new credits for the HD versions).

I think that's because they were using a mixture of UK broadcast masters and international ones (with some Granada Plus edits thrown in the mix, they were clearly using the first copies they came across). And during those few months, the international ones kept using the previous endcap, rather than the "Production for IT*" one. Clearly when they introduced the new endcap in June 1990 they stopped going to the effort of changing the endcap for international versions and just kept the UK endcap on, even if it did have the "For IT*" bit which was meaningless outside the UK.

One way it was clear they were using different masters was the Alan Bradley being hit by a tram episode- on the Network DVD, using the UK broadcast masters (with the "producution for IT*" endcap), there's tape damage on one scene. ITV3 showed a (presumably international) version with no tape damage on said scene, and the previous blue endcap at the end.

Then there's the Granada Plus edits where they replaced the endcaps entirely with a "Production for Granada Sky Broadcasting" endcap. ITV3 showed these for a while when they ran a G+ edit, but then they started covering it up with the 1990-92 endcap instead. Which was blatantly obvious when it came to episodes made after the 1992 endcap was introduced.

A less severe one was when Granada Plus showed Emmerdale- they just covered up the "For IT*" part, but kept the rest of the endcap. Apart from the 1996-97 "Channel 3" era where they kept on using the 1994-96 endcap. I don't think any of those edits have turned up on ITV3 thouh.

I think Scottish Television have done it with a few shows as well. Taggart springs to mind, where endboards with the Bertie Bassett logo were replaced with later 1989-92 thistles.

not guilty: BT Sport, whose revised repeats of The Big Match finish with the original 1970s/80s LWT or Granada endcap; followed by a 2008 ITV Sport slate (from their first outing on ITV4); then a 2018 BT Sport Classics slate.

Do they show the TVS edition which ITV4 showed as well?