What an absolute bleeding mess BBC2 is these days. This constant use of old idents, such as for last night and for the Afternoon Classics, may be lovely for us who are interested, but the whole channel is becoming an incoherent mess that clearly sees itself as well past it's best.
The amount of times they've trawled out the old idents in the past few years shows you how much confidence they have in the current ones. As nice as it is to see them doing it, it's getting a bit overdone now.
:-(
A former member
Cant there just drop the crap new ones and go back to the old ones? 1997 set anyways.
That the current look hasn't been replaced is understandable.
That basic fixes (restoring the position of the logo to where it was intended to be, creating a new trailer template that bears some semblance of broadcast design knowledge, using all of the pretty limited number of "Windows" available to them) haven't been applied to at least make the channel look the best it could, when resources have been spared for other, non-regular presentation devices, not so much.
It was never that great to begin with but was managed dreadfully, like they'd ordered something they didn't want but was far too late to do anything about, then made it worse and now it trundles along in a confused, decaying state, to the point where you wonder if the intention is to pummel it into the ground until something
has
to be done.
Personally, I think we are nearing the end of the current idents' era, especially as they are pulling out some of the old and nostalgic idents. It's seems quite similar to what happened in 2006, with Predator and Christmas 2000 being reintroduced. Also considering that the current albeit dreadful presentation package has been in use for over 7 years, I wouldn't be surprised if a rebrand is announced next year.
I didn't find the current package that bad when it was first introduced. The problem is that all of the unnecessary changes that the BBC has made to it has absolutely ruined it. The "bouncy" trail design, the unfitting soundtrack changes to the idents, it's all
rubbish
!
It is brilliant to see all the old idents on screen again but it really shows the downward spiral of quality and likability that BBC Two pres has taken.
Well if we were following past BBC design trends, this set should have lasted around six years, with a rebrand last year or coming up, but there are obvious reasons why it's going to stay much longer. I can unfortunately envision the BBC One circles set reaching a decade of use at this point in time...
A couple of dubious widescreen conversions there, bug zapper particularly having the same issue for both Wales and NI - did the nations pool their resources in reversioning these perhaps? Or were they really shown with that cyan border?
Weren't Bug Zapper and Aerial part of the 1997 package that were produced in widescreen? At the same time they edited the previous idents to fit the new format, which is why the '2' looks bigger on those classic idents in the new widescreen versions. If you look at the edge of Copper Cut Out you can see that they cropped the image in the centre but stretched it on the far left and right so the cropping wasn't as bad as it could have been. You can tell on Firecracker as well when the 2 verges to the right, it stretches momentarily.
Bug Zapper may have been CGI which is why those cyan borders appear on modern TVs (and video uploads!) without overscan. If it was made nowadays I'm sure it would be removed but it didn't matter as much then. If you look at Aerial you can see that also has nasty stuff on the edges that wouldn't have been seen on old CRT widescreen sets.
EDIT: Actually if you compare the network version of Paint and Copper Cut Out, I think the Copper Cut Out is actually a 4:3 copy that's been cropped and stretched, whereas Paint is using a clean version of the 16:9 crop from 1997, with a new version of the 1991 logo applied. You can tell because the BBC logo is stretched in Copper Cut Out and looks slightly different as well. That said, the 1991 idents went out clean with a BBC logo generator instead of being burned into the tape, so I could be completely wrong and they just messed up the dimensions of the BBC logo whilst remaking Copper Cut Out.
Last edited by VMPhil on 23 June 2014 9:50pm - 2 times in total
A mess yes, even down to the logo, I've seen numerous Gill Sans 'TWO' box logos in the past couple of days, especially from BBC Sport trailers.
DP
D.Page
Something I don't normally see with these ident playouts is that there seems to be what looks like a very brief cue dot(?) at top-left corner, 17 seconds into Saturday's playout of BBC2 Wales Car ident (3:56 in the video, a few posts ago).
