The original BBC ident

Did anyone catch the original BBC TV ident from the 1950's on The Unseen Eric Morecambe programme? I don't recall seeing this on TV before, and I'm not sure how to describe it. Suffice to say I've seen something similar at the end of Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out video. (It's probably on TV Ark or Transdiffusion)

Also shown on the show was the ATV London ident from the 60's. Wonder if the Thames ident will also be shown?

Do you mean this...?
http://thetvroom.com/images-bbc-tv-service/ident-1.jpg
Pictures from The TV Room

You can also see a nice animated on the TV Fetish website on the frontpage for the Ident Ark section.

Yes I did see it. They didn't actually crop the ATV London or BBC logo, however they did crop the Thames logo. Don't know why.

Was nice to seem them though.

Good program too.

And sods law I have only just swapped it for a still. The mock was made by Mulder who has the Pres Heaven site, hope to get it back online soon.

that's odd,I always thought this was the original BBC logo:
http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/images/bbc_eye.jpg

The Bat wings was the one of the first from a 4:3 picture tho.

The ATV and BBC idents had black backgrounds so they could be easily and seemlessly pillarboxed to widescreen - not something you could do with Thames which filled the whole screen. Also if they'd been converted like the prgramme footage they'd have cut off part of the graphic.

It's very common to find in archive/clip shows that normal pictures are converted by removing some or all of the sides, but titles or anything with full screen graphics are done diffrently so to not cut off any text

The "bat's wings", as that symbol was colloquially known (its official name was the Television Symbol), was *not* the original BBC TV ident - not by a long way! It wasn't introduced until 1953, when it replaced the BBC crest as the Corporation's official on-screen identity. However, it *was* the first animated TV identity symbol in the world.

The full history of the bat's wings can be found at http://www.transdiffusion.org/emc/baird/symbol/

That page also contains a complete original 1956 BBC Television startup which features the bat's wings in action.

Indeed.

That one was from the original 5:4 era.

my recon may well appear on that transdiffusion page some time in the future as well as on TV Fetish.