E4, More4, Film4 and 4Music Rebrand:

The Chart Show wouldn't really fit in on the Vault these days (especially episodes from the earlier years), as it's targeted towards a younger audience now, with more recent music.

The Vault did used to show repeats of the Chart Show, but that was quite a few years ago, when it showed older music.

Another new ident from E4 has appeared, marking their first new one for 2019. As far as I can tell it premiered before Baewatch last night at 10pm, but I will review some more junctions this evening just to see if it popped up any earlier.

This time round it's all action figures set up on a battlefield, filmed in a 'frozen moment in time' style. Almost feels like this could have worked as a special one for Adult Swim, given the similarity in style to Robot Chicken.



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Why did they keep 4Music as 4Music when they brought it to the entertainment section and rebranded as an entertainment channel? It is now even showing less music since they rebranded it and still has the 4Music name. Would a rename to T4 or something not be better suited?

I don't think they have the rights to the T4 name. While it started as a strand on Channel 4 production of T4 was eventually farmed out to an indie, Princess Productions, which was folded at the end of 2017 primarily because they were low on money, had lost their studios and lost a major production contract as well.

I would be very surprised if Channel 4 didn’t own the brand name especially as it started as Channel 4 production and it’s basically Channel 4 brand extension.

I think if they were to rebrand the channel I’m not sure they’d both resurrect the T4 brand.

Incidentally I read on Bothers Bar, Hatrick Is to start producing Mastermind in Northern Ireland, but I doubt that means they now own the format.

T4 was farmed out to a few companies during the period from 2003 on, I think Channel 4 put the contract out to tender every few years, so presumably they owned the brand the whole time

I always felt T4 was at its best when Channel 4 themselves made it, it was live, and it came from the foyer at Horseferry road. It went downhill quite quickly when they started farming it out, moved it to a studio and not much longer afterwards started pre-recording it.

That's correct. The BBC retain all rights to Mastermind, unlike regular independent commissions (where the indie retain the rights for their shows). The BBC in-house shows that the BBC is tendering to both BBC Studios and third party Indies are 'produce for hire' deals - where you are purely paid to make the show, and don't own it.

I'm suprised T4 and E4 coexisted for as long as the did considering both brands were aimed at the same audience.

I’d argue that when they repositioned T4 in 1999 it was towards the 13-18 audience with E4 aimed at 16-34 audience.

There was actually T4 slot on E4 in the early days.

Seems quite hard as well to forget T4 showed a lot of cartoons and kids shows in its early days, they'd all basically gone by the early 00s. Though they'd gone from Channel 4 in general by then (bar The Hoobs and a couple of other early morning things) anyway. There's even some footage out there of T4 branding (but no in-vision by the looks of things) surrounding pre-school shows

In its final days T4 Sundays moved to E4, after Sunday Brunch took the slot.

I believe T4 on E4 originated in the weekday afternoon slot when the channel launched.

T4 at launch in 1998 was very odd. All of the promotional material was aimed at a teenage audience:


Even the set design with its black background, with neon and metallic designs seemed older skewed at the time, yet at launch T4 began around 5:45 with the idents and dog appearing on top of programmes such as Sharky & George & Sesame Street with Fran Lee doing links between the younger kids programmes from around 7 until 9 and Ben Shepherd taking over.

Everybody assumed it would stand for ‘Teen 4’, but I think some marketing bumph went with ‘Tots and Teens 4’ (or something like that). Within a year they changed it with T4 beginning around 8:30/9:00, changed the branding, moved into the reception (then the restaurant area) and repositioning themselves.