BBC Oneness - idents and presentation

I know! It's as if TV Forum's opinion ISN'T the be-all and end-all!

Hasn't the BBC got to save £80m over the next three years (in News alone)?

Whilst the BBC keeps winning the ratings wars with commercial rivals i can't imagine there is any incentive or business justification to spend cash on logos and idents.

and if they did I suspect the BBC worries about the challenge from the daily mail et all and the fallout which would inevitably follow if, on one hand they spend a bucket load of cash on idents, and then decide to close some news services such as regional news, news 24 or local radio/get rid of BBC 4 etc etc. on the other for cost saving reasons.

sadly, i think we've got some years yet of presentation on the cheap.... in fact, i don't ever actually envisage a return to the glory days.

i was watching some pres from 1995 and 1996 on youtube earlier, and, i think it's fair to say, what the bbc was doing then looked better on screen that what they are doing now.

Would people prefer one well designed ident in the style of the globe?

I had an idea for a CGI globe to spin, stop on a country, and zoom through to look at people performing a tradition in said country.

The comments made about Oneness being a one year project are hardly unjustified. Searching “Martin Parr Oneness” into Google , the first three results are a blog post on the BBC Creative page referring to a “year long collaboration” and the other two are news articles both making reference to capture an evolving portrait of modern Britain “for 2017”. Whilst I suppose you can now read that as being rolled out across 2017 (despite us having seen no new idents for the latter four months), it wasn’t really naive to assume this was simply a one year stopgap as some posters are suggesting.

A "year long collaboration" may mean it took a year to actually make the idents, but they could well be spread out over a longer period, so the statement would still technically be true.



I know I've posted about this before, but I'd rather see a series of idents showing the globe formed up of various items along a theme - perhaps newspapers for the news, headphones and stereos for music shows, that kind of thing. If you look up the Disney Channel idents from 1999, you'll hopefully see what I mean.

Pip showed it could be done in the mocks forum a couple of years ago.

Unsurprisingly the BBC One typeface doesn't appear to support Cyrillic - an alternative had to be found:

A quick referral with an English to Russian online translator shows it all checks out nicely (as you'd expect).

There are two reasons why BBC One dumped the globe symbol.

1. BBC News already used the globe symbol
2. Retaining the globe symbol for BBC One was seen imperialistic and a relic from the days of broadcasting to the British Empire.

Not sure I buy the first idea - BBC Sport introduced a globe based ident in 1988. If this had been an issue wouldn't BBC1 have done something other than the laserdisc globe and the hot air balloon globe?

I get the reasoning behind point 2 on the imperialistic front, but the problem is the same as a lot of things in modern life, which is that the replacement is so bland, inoffensive and generic that it goes to the other end of the spectrum and becomes unmemorable.

There is a charm about, for example, old spinning models and wooden sets in sitcoms when compared to flashy CGI and sleek production values, especially if everybody does it.