BBC News nostalgia, including BBC World

Not really sure that up and down the country, viewers were saying "Doris, that looks like a swastika!"

But if someone makes that comparison in the press, it can become lodged in your head, as happened with the old BT logo....




It's a bloke drinking a yard of ale, isn't it?

Question from one of the uploads from Robert's collection. Any idea why the Six music was used here, for what appears to be a weekend bulletin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWdOiLU0yQM

Probably not, but I do remember seeing it for the first time with my dad, and he said, 'umm, reminds me of the 1930s, and not in a good way'!

Must have been a mistake or the usual weekend music wasn't available.

Was it definitely compared to a swastika? I thought the issue was that the lightning bolts looked a bit like the Nazi 'SS' logo.

I’d agree with that. The headlines were the normal format for weekends, not the Six version. If anyone has the MHP-chat archive it might’ve been discussed there at the time.

Weren't the titles during this period played in from laserdisc? I wonder if the wrong sequence was selected just prior to transmission? Surely if they had done a rehearsal they would have noticed the error so my guess is that if it wasn't a deliberate choice it must have been a last minute accident.

It always seemed strange that the weekend short bulletins used the Six opening and set with the Nine music.

Yes, the complaints were it did seem to resemble the kind of iconography that would be used at the time, and also the flickering in the titles was considered distracting. It was never very popular at the time. The fact they refreshed the graphics twice during its life (and during the 1992 election campaign used a different set completely) suggests they weren't especially happy with it.

There's some interesting stuff about it in the One Day In The Life Of Television book, which of course is from 1st November 1988, the day after the relaunch. Martyn Lewis had done the first night and says that he was really disappointed with how it looked on screen, saying that the camera angles suggested "we can't decide if we're in a newsroom or a studio, so we'll just stay wide so you can always see both" and asking "what happened to those bold shots we piloted?". Michael Buerk was doing that night and said watching it the previous night said it looked like everyone had nipped off to the pub and asked Martyn to hold the fort.

It also includes a contribution from Mike Smartt, later a big figure at BBC News Online but then a reporter and newsreader, who said that on the first night nobody wanted to sit on the desks where they were in vision, so it looked completely empty and rubbish, so on the second night they asked loads of people to sit there and everyone complained it was distracting. He says that halfway through he forgot he was on air and strode across to find a paper, and the next day more people said to him "Saw you on the news last night" than they'd ever done in the previous six months when he'd actually been presenting it.

Alastair Stewart also contributes and says he hated the whole thing, especially starting with the newsreader in vision. Which of course is now pretty standard, on all channels.

Yes, and the top part was used in the 80s on many BBC Engineering documents

The late 80s news logo was also adapted to a deparemtal logo for the, then new, News and Current Affairs and used on the copyright line on credits. It was a skewed triangle with a ring around the top made to look a bit like a dog... a newshound?

I take it you mean this one?



Pretty sure it's a stylised depiction of a transmitter (similar to the one on the front of the BBC Engineering booklet above) and a satellite dish with a stream of data. A precursor to that included in today's countdowns.

Quite where you get the dog from...