Channel 3 North East and Carlton Central/Westcountry

Yes, it was an utter mess! Any sort of brand identity was lost in a 'Tyne fog'

They weren't using all 3 at once if that's what you are saying, only the hearts and either the old or new regional ident.

Ah right.

I have to ask, was the 98 ident only used for local shows or any old junction after Nov 98.

I presume you mean after Nov 99. It was used much the same way as the Yorkshire regional idents: that is, before the regional news and regional programmes. Network programmes which were time-shifted in one GMG North region due to some special event in that region still usually had the normal hearts idents. I recall, from very fuzzy analogue fringe reception, seeing Yorkshire go into some late evening programme a good 40 or so minutes later than Granada (and presumably Tyne Tees) because they were showing a Leeds United Champions League match, whereas Granada and most of the rest of the network were taking the Manchester United game. I think the Leeds United game went into extra time. It was very fuzzy reception so I couldn't hear the continuity announcement very clearly but it seemed like the same announcement I'd heard on Granada a little while earlier, suggesting it was just delayed output. Either that or Bob Preedy just read out live but with the exact same script, or at least very similar.

By the way, there is an example of the Tyne Tees 98 logo in use in 2000 on TV Ark. It's in the News subsection on the opening of an edition of North East Tonight. Just before the rebrand, apparently, so one of the last outings for this ident.

It seems that clip is near enough right http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/series/33776

And your right I do mean Nov 99, I dont know why I do that.

I don't suppose anyone knows the reason that HTV painstakingly replaced every ITV logo in promos with its own, and yet the other UNM regions let them be?

Hardly painstaking; they simply burned their own solid logo over the static ITV DOG. Looking at YouTube, they weren't even consistently removing it from vision for the slide at the end.

I came across this today on You Tube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQHftMB8IJw

It's a Carlton Central sales promo video produced at the time when the regional names were scrapped in favour of ITV 1 in 2002 and the ghastly 'celeb' idents appeared. This example is one of many similar ones Central produced over the years and features Bob Warman, Marie Ashby and Wesley Smith to highlight the triple region, though it comes across slightly forced due to the constant use of the ridiculous "ITV1 Central England' name.

However what is interesting about the video is the opening Carlton ident - which I had never seen before. It uses an aminated star as the form up then goes into the endboard style that Carlton adopted in 2002:
http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/itvlondon/itvlondon-carltonmain/endboards/end-carlton2002full.jpg
(Image from TV Ark)
The music is from the brilliant 1999 Carlton idents.

This ident was most probably produced to be used as a Carlton corporate ident - but was it? As a few weeks ago on Twitter, ‏@televisionsouth stated that in 2001 Meridian were working on new idents which were never broadcast:

(Image from Twitter user @televisionsouth)
Of course these Meridian idents could of just been intended to proceed regional programmes, in a similar way to YTV and TTTV's idents. So was this Carlton ident just a corporate one, or part of a new ident package, never broadcast, to replace the 1999 ones?

Do you have the tweet about it?

I'll try!

https://twitter.com/televisionsouth/status/468045341049499648

Wow. The same thread had what seems to be a news ident for YTV 1999. No local scenes and shows the channel name instead.

https://twitter.com/televisionsouth/status/468031614833139712/photo/1

The region was referred to for AA while as ITV1 Carlton for Central England during the early days of the generic look. The ident just had an ITV1 Carlton logo - later it became "ITV1 for Central England".

I remember someone at the time (possibly Andrew Wiseman from 625.uk.com ) collecting that befire the generic look, HTV News was an HTV production on HTV - later HTV News became a Carlton production on ITV 1 Wales/West.