30 years ago today: the smokey globe and the 2s

I'm sure the first incarnation of Saturday Starts Here was live with Peter Simon, who would then continue taking part in Going Live! That was for 1987 and 1988, with a revamp in 1989 that saw pre-rec links with the Radio Roo character Clive the Kangaroo and his friend (?) Dennis, played by Wayne Jackman.

Seems strange that they use the ident into Going live, THEN have the unveiling after the titles, even though we've already seen it around 40 seconds earlier.

Controversial opinion: though those stings were very well made, I'm not sure it was a good idea to basically just do the same thing with a numeral 1 that they had already done with a numeral 2. If anything it just made BBC1's identity more confused.

I think that's fair - the 1 & 2 of the 90s complemented and contrasted with each other nicely.

I do think though the 1 was somewhat envious of the 2, hence the increasingly more elaborate stings as we hit the mid-90s.

Saturday Starts Here was a strange thing. CBBC continuity but done by the Going Live team, often from outside the studio as I recall.

I'm not convinced it was live. The Going Live studio would have better things to do than continuity links in the run up to a three hour live show. Much easier to stick the links on tape during the week and let NC1 play them out.

As you mention, initially it was indeed part of Going Live, with the links from around the studio, and Going Live was billed as a part of it - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1987-09-26
But as you suggest, it probably wasn't live. Although Pip and Saz are billed there, for most of the time it was Peter Simon and/or Trevor and Simon doing it, and in those days Peter Simon was usually in the studio during Going Live, presumably for continuity purposes, that also being the era Double Dare was much more integrated into the programme with the set looking very similar to the Going Live set, as opposed to later years when it was clearly a pre-record and looked totally different, with Peter Simon rarely seen on the rest of the show.

One I vividly remember was one morning when Trevor and Simon were supposed to be getting the studio ready, but accidentally demolished it and had to rebuild it, and then on Going Live they were in an odd-looking studio for the start of the show, I remember them sat on directors' chairs in front of a desk. For ages I assumed there was a strike on and they had to use a studio dressed for another show, and that was how they covered it, but seemingly not as I've seen quite a bit of that Going Live and after the first cartoon it's all back to normal. Seemed a very elaborate joke, I don't know what the context was.

Then after two years of that, as you mention, Saturday Starts Here was revamped, started earlier (at 7.30 rather than 8.30) and was totally self-contained, with Wayne Jackman and Clive the kangaroo doing the links - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1989-10-07

One interesting thing about that year was that during the Commonwealth Games it moved over to BBC2, with Going Live staying on BBC1, which wasn't usually the case - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbctwo/england/1990-01-27 I remember Jackman doing a bit of business with a lever with BBC1 and BBC2 on it. Funny the things, eh?

All this was only in the winter, of course, and in the summer it would be the usual on-duty announcer, which became the case again all year round between 1990 and 1992.

One of the other things I remember about that period was that the OU programme immediately before the kids shows was a course on geometry, and because I was an awful kid who woke up stupidly early, I used to see most of it (I was such a Beeb kid at that point it didn't matter if there were kids' shows on TV-am or C4, I would rather have watched the Open University), and I think a week or two after the new globe launched, they did quite a long sequence about the COW and how that worked.

Thinking about the clock that appeared in that clip (which didn't last long before it was replaced with a version with a smaller face), it was a minor flaw with this era that the need for the BBC blocks to be consistent with the idents left nowhere for the channel numerals to go and hence had to omitted altogether, leaving both BBC1 and BBC2 identified on-screen simply as 'BBC'. One advantage of the 1997 look was that the full channel names could at last be restored to the clocks.

In fact, if they had thought of that in 1991 and had /B/B/C/ O N E at the bottom of the screen, that could have removed the need to have a numeral inside the globe, and we could have been left with a globe that actually looked a globe!

This is the only clip I can find from either incarnation of Saturday Starts Here, looks like Wayne Jackman himself posted it:



The reference to Valentines Day being "last week" leads me to assume this is from the 17th February 1990.

I actually felt sad reading that, because that is exactly what they will do...

I'd argue that was a testament the strength of the identity. The colour scheme of each channel was so distinctive, you didn't necessarily need to see the numeral on screen to tell at a glance which BBC channel you were watching.

I'd always presumed Saturday Starts Here was live due to something that went wrong once - Peter Simon was trying to demonstrate a ball that laughed if you hit it (might've been a competition prize?), but despite a number of attempts it refused to literally play ball. He then back referenced it later in Going Live! Doesn't necessarily mean his links were live of course, but it seemed as though they were. He stopped appearing in the Going Live! studio in series 3 (1989-90), which coincided with the revamped ("roo-vamped) Saturday Starts Here.

I think Double Dare's studio always tied in with the design of the Going Live! studio in any particular series. This continued with series 1 of Run the Risk, part of the final series (6) of GL. Future series of RTR retained that design, rather than reflect the Live and Kicking studio when it became part of that show.

Was there a reason that Peter Simon was hanging around TC7 for Going Live in series 1-3?

Other than the ability to plug Double Dare live there didn't seem to be any other reason.
Unless he was the 'nominated survivor' and would jump in and take over presenting if Pip or Sarah - for whatever reason - couldn't present the show, or part of?