Channel 3 North East and Carlton Central/Westcountry

Here's the second abandoned hearts content as actually designed... You can see why Carlton went back to Lambie Nairn after having this delivered as their potential new brand:

I personally find the unused ITV Hearts idents quite interesting, and how it was revised over and over again. I think that there was another unused set between the well-known originals and the not-so-well-known examples here.

They're extremely dark and moody. That said, you can clearly see that this was the basis of the final design. As well as being lighter, Anglia and Meridian got full colour logos in the final designs. Carlton may well have been put off but not entirely. They, too, clearly took these idents as the starting point for their own ones. Some of the atmospheric aspects of the music in these is closer to Carlton's star idents than the official network ones.

Ignoring the darkness and moodyness, these idents offer up some interesting transitions that were not retained in the final designs. Shame in a way.

I take it Granada would have never have used Carlton ident?

Is anyone able to confirm that Tyne Tees really did carry on using the 1998 post-C3NE ident for regional junctions until September 2000? It's taken as given that this is what happened but I've yet to see a single example of a junction using the old ident between November 1999 and September 2000. If they did, what happened in July 2000 when ITV switched all presentation to widescreen as the old TTTV ident was 4:3 - was there a widescreen cropped version used for the final few months until they introduced the
rebrand?

I can see why YTV had separate regional idents as they had a new batch already made so there may have been a perceived need to give that presentation which had been bought and paid for some use, but would GMG really allow a pre-generic Tyne Tees ident (which was only ever supposed to be a stopgap anyway) to carry on into the generic era? And if they did, then it seems odd that the Granada region didn't continue to use their old ident for regional junctions too.

Is it possible that early TV pres websites (which were often based largely on the author's imagination to fill in the gaps of the sparse amount of material that was actually available) documented this because it seemed to make sense given the regional idents that were introduced in September 2000, but in fact September 2000 was when regional idents were *re*introduced to TTTV, and until then they had just used the generics full time?

And when it comes to the rebrand in late 2000, does anyone know what the deal was with the Tyne Tees getting this? It seemed a very odd move to do something like this so late in the day - it was now almost a year since the generic idents had been introduced, and it was odder still that clearly quite a bit of effort had gone into the package yet they didn't bother (ever, even after the ITV1 rebrand) to do a simple re-edit of the hearts ident to include the new logo.

It is odd how Granada ended up with hearts used full time. I can only suggest that back then the regions would have still have had established management in place who would have made the final decision. Yorkshire's were already made, Tyne Tees were probably very protective of keeping their identity as much as possible and had an eye on the rebrand of local output that was the follow later.

Granada maybe less interested, their presentation throughout the mid 90s had been quite messy with those strange idents used before the blue one. Granada's management were probably more likely to want to tow the line considering they owned the other regions and it was their line to tow?

Granada's existing local ident was shorter than Yorkshire & Tyne Tees's I believe which caused dead air when announcing generically, although that wouldn't have mattered in the local junctions.

I've seen that test for Carlton before. No wonder they ditched the unified theme and went off on their own idea via Lambie-Nairn.

I always thought the GMG hearts were dreadful whenever I saw them when visiting the family.

In view of the alternative, having Carlton impose their brand on Westcountry became acceptable, and in retrospect, better than anything that followed.

As far as that is concerned, they were definitely still using the weather front-cap, which was essentially a modified 1998 ident (skip to 2:16).

Never seen a Carlton version of them Idents before. That was awful, even more limp than the Granada idents that did make it to air. The 1998 unused idents were better too, at least musically.

GMG North continuity was never affected by C-Day, throughout the whole duration of the Generic hearts, if the preceding programme was in 16:9 then the ident would be too, if the programme was in 4:3 then the ident would be likewise.

I can't speak for LWT or UNM. But Carlton and Channel 4 continuity went all 16:9 from C-Day.

Tyne Tees definitely carried on using the 1998 ident locally until September 2000. I remember getting a tape of local continuity in Spring 2000 from someone in the region (pre-You Tube, how quaint that all seems now!) and being amazed it was still going, particularly as our local Granada idents had disappeared at rebrand. My guess is that, by this point, GMG pres was essentially being run entirely from Leeds with little input from Manchester. All of the faff two years previously when continuity was handed over (I seem to remember reading of some arrangement where Granada's continuity was always live and the other two regions got pre-records at times?) disappeared pretty quickly with virtually no name checks for the region, and by 2000 the glass G ident (which was also older than both YTV and TTTV's idents) was just dropped from continuity. It was well documented around the time on here and MHP Chat that YTV looked after their own interests through continuity quite well, and Granada itself fell by the wayside a bit despite being the controlling company. I guess Tyne Tees either were still vocal about maintaining their local identity or the Leeds operation were just carrying on as they had since 1992, doing their side of things.

Border is a bit of an unusual one - from what I can gather they threw in their lot transmission-wise with Granada fairly early on (1994?), and therefore YTV from 1998, but were locally owned as late as 2001. Anyone know when their local announcers finally got the boot, as I think they were taking GMG North's continuity for some time before they actually became owned by them?

Loving this thread by the way - love these rambling threads where new information pops up all these years on!

So TT Used Hearts, the 98 ident and the new local branded ident from 99 aswell in year 2000. What an utter mess!