Presentation that just never got used.

Test Thames idents, made pre-launch. (Others here will know more, but apparently these were found at Teddington in the 1990s. I'm sure there are more of these, including one with the ABC chimes)

I quite like the use of "Oranges and Lemons"!!

BBC LDN was a terrible name. I liked the titles and the visuals (though the endboard was the let down, 'ON TV, ON RADIO, ONLINE' etc)


Now I look at it, it seems these titles weren't the final version (there are some things which seem almost 'glitched' (such as the location names appearing in the wrong colour, as if the matte tracking hasn't worked correctly)) and the shots seem a little bit too static, when compared to other versions from the time (South East Today, which adopted the map look also had an 'off' set of titles, with a flat map, rather than the almost 3D effect other regions had)

I was never too sure about the LDN thing but in a way maybe it was ahead of its time, look forward 10 years and every Web 2.0 project was misspelling its name!


The endboard on the 'London' version a few years later was nicer as it had the town names in the background (or destinations as Lambie Nairn called them). Incidently they had to re-edit the original titles as they omitted the www off the web address and in those days that didn't work with bbc.co.uk. They also spelt 'Southwark' wrong but that still appeared in some places for years as it was more difficult to change.

See also 'c*nthorpes'

That whole look of a bit of a map, which often was really identifiable as anywhere in particular, flying around a bit, was bloody awful.

Yeah, the floating map worked for the national news, and to a lesser extent for Scotland, Wales and Newsline. But for most of the regions, particularly the land-locked areas, there was very little to differentiate between them.

I think it worked just as well for the nations as it did for the national news because the maps of Wales, Scotland and NI are widely used in various forms in each nation.

Of course, in Wales we had two symbols...


Cap: TVLive

IIRC, the shapes for the English Regions each "rounded up" and/or "rounded down" to whole counties, so weren't a totally accurate representation of the scope of each region. This was balanced by the selection of "destinations" giving a more accurate indication.

For example, the region shape on Points West included all of Somerset (right up to the Devon border within Exmoor), but I'm sure it didn't feature any place names that would be firmly Spotlight-only territory.

Conversely, the South Today map titles (both in their original form, and when they were revised due to the break-up of Newsroom South East) did not include any part of Wiltshire or Surrey in the shape, and yet mentioned e.g. Salisbury and Crawley. In their latter form, they no longer included any part of the East Sussex county in the shape but continued to list Brighton & Hove.

Good luck working out exactly which areas this is supposed to represent:
http://www.g4fbz.net/dxtv/gallery/tvpics/bbc%20midlands%20logo%201.jpg

Which is why they made the UK Map a little more obvious in those compared to a lot of other regions!