UTV rebrand

Perhaps one of them were unavailable to 'pick up', so therefore re-recorded whatever link it was?

*sucks fun out of speculation*

That's happened before, the first day of Julian's pre-records had Gillian at 7pm.

I have always found ITV tend to match the ident to the type of programme. I feel this practice hasn't been adopted by UTV. For instance concert into tonight's episode of Lesser Spotted Journeys. Perhaps it's due to the lack of new idents available to them.

That kind of answers a question I was going to ask about whether UTV use the same ident as ITV just with their own logo.

You do realise how many ITV idents are currently in use? It's dozens. UTV only had a small number of them adapted.

I don't like lesser Spotted Journey's on UTV so I loaded up the itv hub to stream itv instead - the presentation flows a lot better.

Have to say... I'm going to miss the UTV Christmas idents.. and Julian's Santa updates.. it was great for kids.

Is there a chance they will still do Santa updates? They could be pre-recorded and scheduled as a trailer.

It strikes me as distinctly unlikely - it doesn't really fit ITV's branding and the out of vision continuity style. And it's difficult to imagine they'd want to build up a following for something they'll just drop when the station becomes ITV anyway.

The only way I can see that it could work is as part of an insert on UTV Live. Which obviously wouldn't be all-night "he's over Belfast now" type of thing, but I suppose Julian could appear and forecast at what time he's likely to be in each place.

What is going on with UTV's use of Christmas presentation? They've been using a mixture of normal idents and Christmas idents this weekend and the same with trailers as well?! We had Christmassy idents into X Factor and I'm a Celeb but then normal ones into the news and Peston on Sunday.

That should be the case. ITV use regular idents into the news, not festive ones. Earlier I wrote that I was surprised to see that UTV did use a Christmas ident into the news. However, if they feel that the concert ident is appropriate for the news, does it really come as a surprise?!

That's standard practice on ITV as the Christmas ones aren't suitable to lead into the news.

I don't believe this is unusual. Festive idents are mixed in with the standard set on ITV network as well. The standard set are generally resorted to for (though not restricted to) news/serious programming.