ITV1 in 2001

Carlton's purchase of Central in 1995 was what finally gave them production facilities. Rather ironically, until that point Carlton's biggest network exposure was to 'present' programmes to the network made by their predecessor, Thames! The ditching of the cake and introduction of corporate idents between the two stations was doubtless a soft introduction to what was allready a done deal to rebrand Central to Carlton.


There were earlier versions of the hearts idents (including a magnificent 'glass' version) designed to debut with the new logo in 1998, and would also have fitted in with the original trailers. These were never actually used on air due to the inability of the fragmented ownership of the time to agree on a design. Thus non-corporate idents soldiered on for another year and the eventual design bore no real resemblance to what had originally been conceived.


Yep - Westcountry versions of the spinning blue hearts with a revamped 'W' symbol were indeed made - at first only Central was to be rebranded as Carlton, building on Central using re-edits of Carlton's ident for a year before that. The eventual decision to ditch Westcountry's brand too was only made very late in the day. Had the original hearts idents been used, it is entirely possible that Westcountry would never have been rebranded to Carlton.


When Carlton bought HTV the brand was allowed to live on because by this time Carlton realised that it didn't make a blind bit of difference to their share price to brand all the stations the same. Central and Westcountry were never changed back presumably because that would disrupt a working branding scheme. What was rather petty though was to continue to brand Central and Westcountry as Carlton (remember 'ITV1 Carlton for Central England' and 'ITV1 Carlton for The Westcountry'?) after regional identities were retired from general use - only the build up to the Granada takeover (sorry, 'merger') finally saw them give up their brand name in these regions. Rather ironically, the brands of Central and Westcountry then returned in a commuted form, whilst HTV - the name that had been saved only a couple of years previously - was banished from the face of the earth.

When the Carlton edits of HTV's idents were introduced, there were separate versions for west and Wales - idents on HTV West had 'www.htvwest.com' at the bottom, whilst those for Wales had 'www.htvwales.com'. The separate edits initially even survived the introduction of the ITV1 brand in August 2001, but were gone by the end of the year when all corporate idents had the 'itv.com' animation added (and how tacky does that look now lol).


Westcountry actually started to loose regional branding BEFORE the new ITV logo was introduced. The final set of trailers Westcountry made before the NPU was set up were actually branded using the 1989 ITV logo; they were made by Westcountry and followed a similar style to the 1997 trailers but didn't namecheck it at all.

Otherwise, presentation continued much the same. The 'flying W' breakbumper continued to be used right up to September 1999, at which point many stations had allready been using the generic 'heart splash' for a year, and new idents continued to be added to the set right up to a few months before the Carlton rebrand came in - the very last ones were even made in Widescreen.

Meanwhile, all programmes continued to have '(C) Westcountry Television Limited MCMXCIX' at the end of the credits right up until the final day (when Central had long since lost it's own copyrighting).

The only hint at all that the name would go alltogether came a month or so before the rebrand to Carlton, when all the Westcountry idents started having 'www.carlton.com' inserted in the bottom right hand corner.

To see the original versions of the hearts idents click the links below

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IF-_gT4K0FI

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TfOmPoRFdqw

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2nOHfVKWiyE

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KYwBuMywC_s

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Qce5V6SMAaE

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GVajQNrXAcQ

^ Ah, thanks very much for uploading those. I've seen them before on Continuity Booth. You don't by any chance have those moody deep blue ones, which would've given children nightmares. The Anglia logo looked horrid in just yellow.

This brings up more questions about the process of getting dual branding on screen. Those idents were the ones originally planned for October 1998 but certain stations objected? How much influence did the stations have in how the design would come about? I assumed the only people who would've had any consultancy on the design would've been between ITV Network Centre and English Markell Pocket. The way Carlton went away and had different idents made by a different company but were coincidently similar to the final design of the official idents, suggests Carlton were able to follow the design process before they opted out. I assume those moody ones were being banded about and perhaps, understandable in my opinion, put Carlton off.

However, it seems GMG North were preparing their own rebrand, based on what would end up as Yorkshire's local ident in the hearts era. There's a website with several of these on where it is suggested that GMG weren't aware of the arrival of the hearts idents. Particularly as there seems to be more than twenty variations of the local Yorkshire idents, which is a bit much for only a very limited number of junctions per day, suggests that they were to be used full time. Also, Christmas idents appeared on GMG north that year in this exact style, despite official Christmas hearts idents being available and being used by LWT, as well as the UNM regions. Perhaps, GMG initially gave up on waiting, particularly once Carlton had pulled out, assuming that the project would sink? But when finally presented with the final designs, they decided to ditch their own scheduled revamp in favour of the official idents? Anyone know much about this?

No ITV branding on either the Yorkshire ident or the Christmas idents is an interesting observation, as well as the new Tyne Tees ident introduced the next year. Seems GMG North weren't the most enthusiastic about 'ITV'. Also, during joint Granada/Yorkshire/Tyne Tees continuity they wouldn't name check the station 'ITV' despite the name appearing on the logos, preferring to call the stations 'here'. However, they always name checked the local stations when continuity was separate. Sometimes, dedicated continuity was given to each region before networked programming, Often it wasn't. How come? Weirdly, in the final few months, it seems Granada was getting dedicated continuity much more often, in front of things such as Coronation Street, despite the brand disappearing only a few months later.

The tail to that actually appears to be a remixed version of the Get Ready 1989 jingle. Granada's looks OK, but LWT's wasn't very good at all - not very colourful, and very dreary.

LTW's 'aquafresh' colour logo was never going to look good on a yellow and blue scheme. They made it all blue in those idents, which looked a bit crap. In the final version, it kept it's colours but the logo seemed to not go very well with the blue background, with it being dumped only a few months later.

I seem to remember seeing a never-used Granada ident, with a refreshed version of the G logo, on some website somewhere once, which would maybe suggest that they had planned to use this when they introduced the Yorkshire and Tyne Tees ones. The font used was the same as what was used for Granada Reports' graphics at the time. It was very nice, and again seems like they never intended to use the eventual ITV idents.

Also, the local trailers at the time used an endboard the same as Yorkshire's (albeit with the Granada logo in the blue squares in the background rather than the Yorkshire chevon, obviously), which was strange as it didn't match any other presentation.

It does look like the package created for ITV contained a hell of a lot more than was actually used, and some of it was used very rarely. From introducing the ITV-branded idents, once in a blue moon Granada would use a next slide containing a very nice spinning metallic hearts background, with no text, logo or pictures on it. It was almost as if this huge package was created, and they just picked out of it little bits to use over and over. It's a shame, from what I've seen of the rest, it does look like a really good set which was unfortunately hacked to death by people who thought they knew better.

http://tvfeatures.thetvroomplus.com/feature-29.html is what I think you're referring to...

http://tvfeatures.thetvroomplus.com/images-itv-pres-designs/film-2.jpg

A next caption' intended for GMG North which seems to match with to some extent...

http://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/images/yorkshireshort2001b.jpg

And the Christmas idents, of which there was a Tyne Tees example on the web somewhere, but I can't seem to find it.

http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/tyneteesxmas.jpg

As you say the GMG North trailer endboards (did LWT use these as well) did match up in a way to the ITV hearts what with the spinning hearts replaced by spinning squares, so there must have been a connection somewhere?

During this period, what did Granada use before regional programmes? the hearts or the old blue Granada logo?

This thread is very old school style TV Forum and that's good. All this stuff should be documented somewhere, for example even though today's pres may be boring, in 10 years time people will want to know when it launched, when it stopped etc

http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/tyneteesxmas.jpg

Cheers for the ident. That's the one. Granada's and Yorkshire's were the same apart from the station logos. There were millennium idents as well. There's a Yorkshire example of that somewhere on the web.



The trailers were never fully implemented. During the hearts era, regional trailers changed style often. Yorkshire had a style consistent with it's local idents at one point, with spinning chevrons instead of hearts. Granada had similar ones with spinning G's but most of the time just a freeze frame with the time and day the programme was on constituted the final frame.

LWT had separate autonomy from GMG North. It never followed GMG North over Christmas 1999, naturally as GMG North wasn't responsible for it's presentation and so won't have made them any idents. LWT took the official Christmas idents with the robin, along with the UNM regions. It should be noted that the robin was seen in the GMG North regions on network trailers. Probably on Carlton too, Trailers will have been what they wanted them to look like, though not living in London, I couldn't tell you what theylook like.



Just the hearts logo. I don't know why it was different though. Before November 1999, Granada had a variety of idents, the stripe only being used for news and serious programming. Yorkshire and Tyne Tees just had two simple idents each, one for day, the other for night.




Indeed. I'm fascinated by this period. Despite the idea that all the stations were to eventually become one identity, they all took slightly different paths. Hence the long posts with tons of questions. I'd like to know what each station looked like during this era (October 1998 - October 2002) and how it changed during that time.

I can do you Westcountry (putting aside the well documented changes that happened over all 3 Carltons):

Spring 1998 (BEFORE the new logo) - Westcountry's final in house trailer set was for some reason branded as being 'on ITV' with the old logo.

October 1998 - NPU trailers were used, no other presentation was directly affected.

March 1999 - Westcountry's final non-generic idents were introduced (the set constantly evolved between 1993 and 1999 with some added and some retired from time to time - just like the 1991-2001 BBC2 idents) even though they'd only last 6 months. They were made in widescreen, making Westcountry (I think) the first ITV station to have widescreen idents (although they were hardly ever transmitted as such).

Summer 1999 - a couple of months ahead of the rebrand, Carlton's URL was added to the existing Westcountry idents. Local trailers also namechecked www.carlton.com. Again, I think Westcountry was the first ITV station to do this. It was also around this time that I noticed that 'A Westcountry Production' had become 'A Westcountry Programme' on the endboards, although I don't know when this change was actually made.

Sunday 5th September 1999 - this was the last day the station was branded as Westcountry. The rebrand had only been mentioned by the station a few weeks previously and a surprising number of people were not aware that it was going to happen. Trailers aside, Westcountry's branding package was still as alive as ever. The local news still copyrighted Westcountry

Monday 6th September 1999 - Carlton's corporate hearts look was introduced 2 months ahead of other stations that would be taking it. Westcountry would never operate under it's own name again. Despite the deridement of it at the time, operationally nothing changed at Westcountry. Continuity was still done locally in Plymouth by it's own dedicated announcers, ditto weather forecasters, and (for a while at least) it retained it's own control over regional programmes. However, being that they now had lost their own name, the style of announcements did gradually change. The slick, to the point announcements of early Westcountry eventually gave way to almost TSW-like levels of regional rooting, the main 7PM prime time intro would frequently receive an announcement like 'Welcome to your evening's viewing here on Carlton from all of us at the team in Plymouth'.

Early 2000 - Westcountry had a practice of covering over the idents of the night service they took with their own. At first after the rebrand, this continued, with Carlton's idents being run 24 hours a day (not sure whether it was like this on Carlton London and Central aswell). At this time, they started towing the corporate line and used the generic 'ITV' branding with spinning blue hearts overnight.

Early 2001 - comissioning and support of regional programming was shifted to Central, taking Westcountry's last control over it's own output away. However, there was a smidgin of regionality back in - Carlton commissioned new regional websites for it's 3 stations and this lead to local trailers having 'www.carlton.com/westcountry' in the URL rather then just 'www.carlton.com' as they had been ever since the rebrand.

Summer 2002 - perhaps ahead of the generic ITV1 look that was coming, the station was continually namechecked as 'ITV1 for the South West' by the dayshift announcers even though the on-screen branding had never changed. The main duo of Chris Langmore and Peter Griffin didn't do this.

October 2002 - the final 'special' ident made by Carlton was for a repeat of Star Wars just a couple of weeks before the generic rebrand. It used the formup of the 'sombre' ident which resolved onto a starfield background. Ironically, this ident came so late that it wouldn't even get to see out the entire repeat season, the final film was aired under the new national ITV1.

Sunday 27th October 2002 - After more than 41 years of locally sourced continuity from Plymouth, the final announcement from Plymouth was made. Were there special 'ITV1-less' edits of the idents like HTV had? Were there big 'goodbye' speeches like Central and GMG North Had? Was there a whole package of goodies like LWT had? No. Neither of the two main announcers, despite having worked at Westcountry for almost 10 years, bothered to work the final shift (or even pre-record an announcement). Instead, some duty announcer said 'now Martin Lewis and his panel discuss today's Ultimate Questions' - that was it, the last ever announcement from Plymouth.

For some reason the music on this one reminds me of the Pearl & Dean jingle.