Broadcast Clocks

Whooooooooooooooosh

All BT exchanges and sites have a four letter ID. Microwave sites generally starting with a Y. Tolsford Hill is the BT site at Folkestone, that deals with the links to France.

Just Saying

'87 it came in.

They were still using the twin-border clock in August of that year:

Tbh it looks to me as if that's the same hardware on the '87 Granada clock as the 1990 one.

The Perspex Granada G logo used in the trails looks awfully like the one used for the 1995 idents.
I’m sure I’ve read it was shot through a Perspex logo with the cgi added later.

It probably was, to be fair.

I wanted to bump this thread on this point, comparing screenshots on TV-Ark and it would seem that for the 1997 Balloons rebrand on BBC 1, the real clocks are identified by the hour/minutes hands being ever so slightly thicker than the pre-recorded variants sent to the regions on tape. Makes me wonder if the regional variants that were used in the regions were made in the likes of Smoke/Early AfterEffects or similar. I always assumed they'd just turned the BBC One legend off on a spare box and recorded X amount of seconds footage into the top of each hour (1, 6 and 9).

The BBC Midlands Clock was often live apparently, as it was an option on the vision mixer (even after the clocks got retired, ticking away at Pebble Mill until its death) - I wonder where that particular box went...

Going back to an earlier iteration, the BBC English regions had coffin-type devices for clocks, globes, captions, and even rotating symbols, such as an " N " for BBC Leeds. The output of a monochrome camera went into a three-level-cox-box.

As described in this thread above, national TV wouldn't go from one NODDY shot directly to another, but it was common for BBC North /Leeds (and presumably other island sites) to go from globe to clock and vv by switching the lights in the coffin. It wasn't instant, the caption disappeared to a blank background raster, then the new symbol appeared as the lamp illuminated; a bit like mechanical slide change. As it was all self-op, you could hear the button-press on the change.

I think we established previously that BBC Midlands had a COW era clock generator for when Pebble Mill was the disaster recovery facility for network playout, so I guess not surprising that this got updated.

Ted, can you say a bit more about how this coffin device worked please? Your point about switching the lights makes me think that there was some arrangement with mirrors so multiple captions could appear in front of the camera depending on which was lit up?

You can see the arrangement at BBC Manchester's old old studios in Piccadilly on https://www.tvark.org/?page=121

I'm sure this will have been posted in this thread already, but it's believed that network had a coffin housing a second clock in addition to the Noddy one.

https://cleanfeed.thetvroom.com/2165/features/the-mystery-of-the-additional-mechanical-bbc-clocks/

At about 36” in this clip you can see the NODDY in all its glory, with the lights going out as is moves and re-illuminating when it stops...

Thanks for the link. My wife used to work in BBC Presentation and 'did that', I'll bring it to her attention for old times sake.

All the smoking... truly a different world.