That 1989 ITV ident

I find it strange a big region like Thames didn't have an electronic clock, but were still using a physical one superimposed on an ITV generic slide by 1990.

They were still using a piece of cardboard as their ident in 1988.

Thames? I'm not sure there was ever any cardboard involved, except maybe the backing for the original photo montage.


It was made with film techniques and then in about 1984 it was remade in a digital form (this version has a different, less distorted reflection).

Eh - Thames had a digital ident from the mid-80s... The Thames reflected skyline was generated electronically far earlier than people may realise.

I remember reading an article in an electronics magazine (I may even still have it somewhere) on the Thames logo going digital. I seem to remember they scanned the slide original and put the whole thing on ROM maybe EPROM. Then the software (maybe even dedicated digital hardware then) mirrored the bottom half and they just changed the piece displayed. Basically they didn't need to store the whole sequence just the single frame.

Yes that's right, hence the reason that on the original the reflection is rippled - it's was done by purposely distorting the mirror, but not in the digital remake

So the person was ill-informed and TVS deffo never used it. UTV might have used it one weekend in September? I wonder if anyone else looked at it.

Yes - that's how it was done digitally. The BBC Blue/Gold globe (aka COW) was done cleverly too. There were two still frames stored of a blue globe and a gold globe, and then a digitally compressed (run length encoding I think) simple (binary) matte/key stored of the land mass animation which created the composite live.

Any idea what the motivation was behind remakes like this? It wasn't just Thames, but many long running animated idents were remade during their lives, only to end up with something that wouldn't look any different to the majority of people. I can understand if you were playing out from a grubby piece of film then you might want to remaster onto a modern format, but why actually bother to remake them?


I remember the mocks. What I think could have worked would be if the ident form up was slightly extended, so that it did resolve initially into the full logo spilling out of the end of the 'V' similar to your mocks, then the parts outside of the 'V' would fade away so only the part that in the was left. You'd still end up with only part of the logo visible on the completed ident, but at least it would be obvious where it had come and be part of the real logo rather than some weird abstract version.


TSW definitely did not use the generic ident at all. Harry Turner ruled out the use of any presentation which would dilute TSW's own brand (in the mid 80's they were even editing out frontcaps from other stations a couple of years before the network officially ditched them). However, at about the same time as the generic look launched they did refresh their presentation. The main animated ident was relegated to use only as a frontcap for their own programmes, whilst new 'seasonal' idents and various accompanying slides were introduced for presentation use (and weren't actually very good tbh. Fortunately they still had IVC).


I thought there was no 'official' generic clock as part of the package, some stations simply made their own interpretations of it to fit in?

Was it the case that transferring from film to VT wouldn't look as good as remaking it from scratch on VT?

They did used the “Ulster Television Production for ITV” caption on the rare occasions they produced anything for the network. This caption was made up n conjunction with the unused (in UTV’s case) generic ident.