BR
If I did a mock, the chances are it may seem like a **** mock to you - but it'd be a damn site better than the **** state UKtv seemed to have abondoned their dying services with at the moment!
If UK Gold worked at it they could really bring back that magic they used to have in the 1990s, when it was just one singular service without all the others, but since the 1997 overhaul and the addition of UKTV vast services, the recent attempts to unify the channel have been a complete sham. You call that branding - even Safeway have better ways of branding their toilet paper! Come on! There was a time when you could proudly switch on your cable decoder (as it was known round 1997), flick between all the UKtv channels (Horizons, Play, Style, Arena etc), and actually stay watching and tuned in... and what kept you hooked? The consistency that was kept throughout the network, and its ability to keep its trailers looking sharp, neat, and centralized - ala BBC1+2 Oct 1997! Nowadays, fast forward a couple of years and its a complete mess! We don't even get two-minute start ups that UK Gold used to treat us to every weekend morning. The nostalgic value of all the shows on UK Gold is equal to last week's chip paper! Trailers have now gone gastly with these stupid "blinds been shoved from the side" method of publicity... I haven't seen one decent menu-slide since god knows how many years, and all these cohesive **** so-called "idents" that you get these days, with "people" in them are making lose the will to live! This morning I was up pretty early and after feeling a little reminiscent of how tv used to be I suddenly found myself watching flaming cartoons on the kids channels, cos I couldn't even bare to switch on UKTV!
Even though I'm a big fan of UK Gold (I don't even call it by its new name) or what I thought was UK Gold, I've stayed loyal by favoritizing all my channels on my Top Up tv box, with UK Gold at the top! If only they done something dramatic and just simpelised the graphics to how we used to see them between 97 & 01 before it all went pair-shaped... So in the cheap no expenses spared program that is Paint (I'm getting Photoshop next week don't worry) out of boredom, I racked my brains to find a way of just tidying the graphics in a contempary way that reflected the nature of how most of the terrestrial channels of today, you know, like ITV1 for instance who seem to have got it sussed so far when it comes to unity. UKtv's family of channels ought to note, it's all gone HI-TECH these days! We have such things as ECPs now and idents that double as reminders for what's on now & next! The whole idea has seemed to have slipped through their fingers! Consistency is the whole object of the game if you want viewers to familiarize themselves with the network! Duh! If I could wave a wand, I would have all the presentation the same, like adopting the same style of menus within idents for instance - this'd be a way for UK Gold to revive their startups, with some music (perhaps the return of the 1994 'Bars' theme, which I've got in full on my old PC at home.) And ECPs, were on the channel long before flipping terrestrial! I seem to recall shows ending in 1993, when Gold was a baby, and the credits like for Dr Who say would shrink to one side to promote an upcoming show on the other! This is 12 flipping years back! Now we don't get a ECP at all, on the very same channel that sparked it all off all them years ago! Same goes for the other channels. My main concern here as you'll notice is with UK Gold - Horizons was good, and Play but UKtv had the audascity to take the only good channels away and dumped us with dodgy replacements, I mean UKtv Docmentary - how the hell can you fit that into any graphic! The only channel that's in need of some TLC so far is really the one that started it all off. I've nearly grown up with the service, I remember having Sky at my mate's and going over just to flick through his Astra setup to watch Sky One, UK Gold & Family Channel, and perhaps with a bit of Cartoon Network on top!
"Gold's Glory Years" is actually a website that I've had the hunch to dream up - yes, it'd be dedicated entirely to the channel that of course once was the most watched service back when satellite was made up of just over a dozen services! I've got shedloads of Gold material that I forever taped round my mate's some of it in stereo. They will prove just how much the channel's changed... You don't get EastEnders Omnibuses like before, you don't even get EastEnders! It's so hard to keep up with the amounts of times they've re-arranged the schedules that you can't be bothered to know whether its on at all, and the only ITV/Thames bit left is The Bill, which has retained its slot since I first got the channel on cable in 1998. Since Flextech took over, UK Gold has lost its identity (no pun intended here!) not just in the presentation but with general output... All they lay on these days are sitcoms that were on only the other night on BBC1! Sadly, since I moved out of my mum's two years ago I can't now even get all of the channel, as I've only got a flimsy Top Up reciever, where the swines have cut the channel in half and only show the crappy half (noon-midnight), expect us to pay for it at £8/month, when they could just knock off all the **** unwatchable UKtv channels, Cartoon bleeding Network and Bumberg and Boomerang that by the time people have got up the service has gone off air, and put UK Gold on full-whack! It's where all the good bits of Gold come alive - during the mornings of course... Top Up viewers suffer the grievences that although their coughing out £8/month they're still missing Eldorado, Dr Who and other gems cos they're on outside TUTV broadcast hours. Meaning I'll have to cough up for Sky now, cos I'm looking forward taping all the EastEnders stuff that they'll lay on in Febraury for its 20th anniversary and knowing Top Up TV I'll probably miss half the **** - sods law proved this in December when I was geared up to record all the Christmas episodes back to back for the first time and the c**** put the Christmas Weekend on from 7.55am - meaning I missed more than I got, cos really they're just roughly 19 episodes, with ads and Ian Beale's faffing about in between that slice them up longer than they should do, so really you don't have the time to bother sitting at the VCR cutting ads out, and give or take the fact that they're unpredictable and probably will put 2 episodes on from one year so its taking up to two hours perhaps for a single year it's just usless! SO I've had it with all of them, the company, the provider, and the broadcasters. Gold better get back to its routes if they want viewers tuning in at all, otherwise they'll find themselves bankrupt and defunct like all the other wankers!
UKtv G2 is the only olive-branch that keeps the whole network alive so far with more archive gems than what UK Gold can shake a stick at... How the hell did that happen!? TOTP2, (which is I suppose a halfway substitute for one of UK Gold's original perks of throwing classic TOTP into the late night schedule) has now officially moved to G2, and with special theme nights keeping the momentum of the channel up, why in god's name don't us TUTV viewers get G2, instead of the dross daytime lifestyle channels that are sickenly excessing tack, and even worse the lunatics have got the nerve to put these channels out when every one's at work! Think about it, if we got it from say 6pm, til 6am, it'd be more benefit, cos late night viewers who are of very sexually dried up orientation might actually be able to benefit from watching the gems that are on the wee small hours on the 2 Gold networks... The question on everyone's stiff upper lips is how long will it be before Goldegedden, cos with no good funding from TUTV, and all its gold magic and originality gone its fate may now only lie within the viewers hands, as it won't be long before the channel's swallowed up by its new unsightly family members, just like Charity Dingle at the moment...
Fellow citizens that may be reading this now, I beg you! Give me the light, as Sean Paul would say! Will UK Gold ever retain its quality and its "Goldness", or do we have to get Goldie the dog back to **** all over the entire network once and for all? In fact I could do with a cac right now... Opinions please while I'm taking a dump
BTW everyone, if you're wondering who the hell I am, don't be fooled by the post count on the left! I'm not new to this drill, I previously used to be king of all the presentation forums back in 2001/2.. since then I've been plagued with personal problems that jeoparised my former supremecy on the net. Some of the longer serving members of the forum, and indeed the site will remember me, but now I've got complete daily access to the internet via AOL, and a tv card, and most important of all a new pad, and a £599 flash new Toshiba Laptop (as you'll see I've now moved from Essex to Hastings down south!) I can happily reveal my identity folks. It's Conrad Higham, back to haunt you all mwahaha! Oh, yeah, and comisarations Asa about the site, I really liked it. Shame you had to jack it all in mate. It was good while it lasted, but hey mate you've got other things planned! I know the drill! Anyhow, this forum's probably the best things that's ever happened to the net! 
Nice one pal, nice to be back and all that!
If UK Gold worked at it they could really bring back that magic they used to have in the 1990s, when it was just one singular service without all the others, but since the 1997 overhaul and the addition of UKTV vast services, the recent attempts to unify the channel have been a complete sham. You call that branding - even Safeway have better ways of branding their toilet paper! Come on! There was a time when you could proudly switch on your cable decoder (as it was known round 1997), flick between all the UKtv channels (Horizons, Play, Style, Arena etc), and actually stay watching and tuned in... and what kept you hooked? The consistency that was kept throughout the network, and its ability to keep its trailers looking sharp, neat, and centralized - ala BBC1+2 Oct 1997! Nowadays, fast forward a couple of years and its a complete mess! We don't even get two-minute start ups that UK Gold used to treat us to every weekend morning. The nostalgic value of all the shows on UK Gold is equal to last week's chip paper! Trailers have now gone gastly with these stupid "blinds been shoved from the side" method of publicity... I haven't seen one decent menu-slide since god knows how many years, and all these cohesive **** so-called "idents" that you get these days, with "people" in them are making lose the will to live! This morning I was up pretty early and after feeling a little reminiscent of how tv used to be I suddenly found myself watching flaming cartoons on the kids channels, cos I couldn't even bare to switch on UKTV!
Even though I'm a big fan of UK Gold (I don't even call it by its new name) or what I thought was UK Gold, I've stayed loyal by favoritizing all my channels on my Top Up tv box, with UK Gold at the top! If only they done something dramatic and just simpelised the graphics to how we used to see them between 97 & 01 before it all went pair-shaped... So in the cheap no expenses spared program that is Paint (I'm getting Photoshop next week don't worry) out of boredom, I racked my brains to find a way of just tidying the graphics in a contempary way that reflected the nature of how most of the terrestrial channels of today, you know, like ITV1 for instance who seem to have got it sussed so far when it comes to unity. UKtv's family of channels ought to note, it's all gone HI-TECH these days! We have such things as ECPs now and idents that double as reminders for what's on now & next! The whole idea has seemed to have slipped through their fingers! Consistency is the whole object of the game if you want viewers to familiarize themselves with the network! Duh! If I could wave a wand, I would have all the presentation the same, like adopting the same style of menus within idents for instance - this'd be a way for UK Gold to revive their startups, with some music (perhaps the return of the 1994 'Bars' theme, which I've got in full on my old PC at home.) And ECPs, were on the channel long before flipping terrestrial! I seem to recall shows ending in 1993, when Gold was a baby, and the credits like for Dr Who say would shrink to one side to promote an upcoming show on the other! This is 12 flipping years back! Now we don't get a ECP at all, on the very same channel that sparked it all off all them years ago! Same goes for the other channels. My main concern here as you'll notice is with UK Gold - Horizons was good, and Play but UKtv had the audascity to take the only good channels away and dumped us with dodgy replacements, I mean UKtv Docmentary - how the hell can you fit that into any graphic! The only channel that's in need of some TLC so far is really the one that started it all off. I've nearly grown up with the service, I remember having Sky at my mate's and going over just to flick through his Astra setup to watch Sky One, UK Gold & Family Channel, and perhaps with a bit of Cartoon Network on top!
"Gold's Glory Years" is actually a website that I've had the hunch to dream up - yes, it'd be dedicated entirely to the channel that of course once was the most watched service back when satellite was made up of just over a dozen services! I've got shedloads of Gold material that I forever taped round my mate's some of it in stereo. They will prove just how much the channel's changed... You don't get EastEnders Omnibuses like before, you don't even get EastEnders! It's so hard to keep up with the amounts of times they've re-arranged the schedules that you can't be bothered to know whether its on at all, and the only ITV/Thames bit left is The Bill, which has retained its slot since I first got the channel on cable in 1998. Since Flextech took over, UK Gold has lost its identity (no pun intended here!) not just in the presentation but with general output... All they lay on these days are sitcoms that were on only the other night on BBC1! Sadly, since I moved out of my mum's two years ago I can't now even get all of the channel, as I've only got a flimsy Top Up reciever, where the swines have cut the channel in half and only show the crappy half (noon-midnight), expect us to pay for it at £8/month, when they could just knock off all the **** unwatchable UKtv channels, Cartoon bleeding Network and Bumberg and Boomerang that by the time people have got up the service has gone off air, and put UK Gold on full-whack! It's where all the good bits of Gold come alive - during the mornings of course... Top Up viewers suffer the grievences that although their coughing out £8/month they're still missing Eldorado, Dr Who and other gems cos they're on outside TUTV broadcast hours. Meaning I'll have to cough up for Sky now, cos I'm looking forward taping all the EastEnders stuff that they'll lay on in Febraury for its 20th anniversary and knowing Top Up TV I'll probably miss half the **** - sods law proved this in December when I was geared up to record all the Christmas episodes back to back for the first time and the c**** put the Christmas Weekend on from 7.55am - meaning I missed more than I got, cos really they're just roughly 19 episodes, with ads and Ian Beale's faffing about in between that slice them up longer than they should do, so really you don't have the time to bother sitting at the VCR cutting ads out, and give or take the fact that they're unpredictable and probably will put 2 episodes on from one year so its taking up to two hours perhaps for a single year it's just usless! SO I've had it with all of them, the company, the provider, and the broadcasters. Gold better get back to its routes if they want viewers tuning in at all, otherwise they'll find themselves bankrupt and defunct like all the other wankers!
UKtv G2 is the only olive-branch that keeps the whole network alive so far with more archive gems than what UK Gold can shake a stick at... How the hell did that happen!? TOTP2, (which is I suppose a halfway substitute for one of UK Gold's original perks of throwing classic TOTP into the late night schedule) has now officially moved to G2, and with special theme nights keeping the momentum of the channel up, why in god's name don't us TUTV viewers get G2, instead of the dross daytime lifestyle channels that are sickenly excessing tack, and even worse the lunatics have got the nerve to put these channels out when every one's at work! Think about it, if we got it from say 6pm, til 6am, it'd be more benefit, cos late night viewers who are of very sexually dried up orientation might actually be able to benefit from watching the gems that are on the wee small hours on the 2 Gold networks... The question on everyone's stiff upper lips is how long will it be before Goldegedden, cos with no good funding from TUTV, and all its gold magic and originality gone its fate may now only lie within the viewers hands, as it won't be long before the channel's swallowed up by its new unsightly family members, just like Charity Dingle at the moment...
Fellow citizens that may be reading this now, I beg you! Give me the light, as Sean Paul would say! Will UK Gold ever retain its quality and its "Goldness", or do we have to get Goldie the dog back to **** all over the entire network once and for all? In fact I could do with a cac right now... Opinions please while I'm taking a dump
BTW everyone, if you're wondering who the hell I am, don't be fooled by the post count on the left! I'm not new to this drill, I previously used to be king of all the presentation forums back in 2001/2.. since then I've been plagued with personal problems that jeoparised my former supremecy on the net. Some of the longer serving members of the forum, and indeed the site will remember me, but now I've got complete daily access to the internet via AOL, and a tv card, and most important of all a new pad, and a £599 flash new Toshiba Laptop (as you'll see I've now moved from Essex to Hastings down south!) I can happily reveal my identity folks. It's Conrad Higham, back to haunt you all mwahaha!
Oh, yeah, and comisarations Asa about the site, I really liked it. Shame you had to jack it all in mate. It was good while it lasted, but hey mate you've got other things planned! I know the drill! Anyhow, this forum's probably the best things that's ever happened to the net! Nice one pal, nice to be back and all that!
