What you like about this telly stuff...

I do remember being aware of the 1991 rebrand of BBC1 and BBC2, but probably noticed title sequences more than channel branding back in those days as often if they were changed they really would change them, rather than just make slight tweaks or polish them up. Branding wise being in a location which could get three ITV regions and S4C I was certainly aware of how different ITV regions were, and how most were not a patch on Central.

I think though it was sports broadcasting where I noticed it more, notably the 1992 Olympics (that "Barcelona" intro!), and then in the following years things got a bit more interesting than simple text on the screen. The Big Breakfast's evolution over 1996-1998 especially were examples of revamps done badly and done well, but news wise it probably wasn't until 1999 when C4, Newsnight, ITN/ITV News and the BBC all revamped within six months of each other that that grabbed my attention - although Central News had always had interesting revamps throughout the 90s - pretty much always revolution rather than evolution.

Completely agree. Having everything to hand whenever you want it is truly wonderful and awe-inspiring (most of the stuff we take granted for now was science fiction stuff when I grew up in the 1980s) but it does rob younger members of the joy of unexpected discovery.

Do you remember (was it) Zabalo? I used to wait ages for his (then) hi-res clips of BBC World presentation to download after I first got broadband in 2001/2002.

I like record collecting for my sins. Discogs, eBay et al are amazing but the joy of going to a record fair in Newcastle in my teens and early 20s and finding something (a release, a remix, etc) which I didn't even knew existed was exhilarating.

It all started about 12 years ago when I was looking at test cards (mainly from the BBC, so Test Card F for example), I started printing out mini test cards at school.

When I got back home, I would watch videos of BBC1/ITV continuity and its idents, one of the first idents I watched was the Children's BBC and ITV idents from the 90's and some of those were wacky. (especially the CBBC idents!)

I used to make mocks in my spare time, which weren't great, but it was good to use my imagination.

I then started watching breakdown videos, which since then has been one of my favourite parts of television, it's so funny to see things go horribly wrong (especially on live TV) but also interesting to see how the channel mitigates the issue.

The one of the first breakdown videos I saw was when Anglia couldn't go to a programme and they were stuck on their ident.

Met some people on YouTube along the way (a couple of them are on this forum) and watched TV presentation videos for a few years before a couple of years ago when I saw that somebody on this site opened up a "TV Breakdowns Appreciation Thread"

So, I created an account here and posted a video in that thread of the protest that forced "The Time The Place" to end 10 minutes early.

And here I am!

I do remember that website. InformativosTV, run by a guy named Pablo Zabalo Goñi. He was a member of TV Forum - I think his username was PZG. His website was one of my favourites because, like you said, he had the first high-res clips of a lot of presentation, including BBC World, BBC News and ITN. I used to spend literally hours waiting for his clips to download but they were worth it in the end. I probably still have a lot of them lurking about on an external HDD somewhere. I used to chat with Pablo via email back then but, like many, he disappeared at some point along the way.

Long before I found the internet I remember being completely obsessed with MLNs 1991 BBC 2 idents. Started very young, probably four or five years old, so obviously had no real idea what they were but I got so obsessed my grandad used to record them for me, bless his heart. I wasn’t too bothered about the presentation of other channels, although I did briefly develop a similar fascination with Channel 4’s blocks in space.

I also remember being terrified of Test Card F, or more specifically Bubbles. It was a clown thing I think. Couldn’t believe the BBC would transmit something so terrifying!

Fast-forward a few years, I was probably 11 or 12 when I found, after some furious AltaVista-ing, Darren Meldrum’s MHP site. As I’m sure it was for others, it was the rabbit-hole I’d been searching for. I just couldn’t believe there were others who were ‘in to’ this same odd activity. Probably took me another six months to build up the courage to join MHP-Chat where a very kind person (I wish I could remember who) sent me a VHS tape full to bursting with old idents from right across the ITV network, and a load of BBC ones thrown in for good measure. I really, REALLY wish I could find that tape again although I think I lent it out to a friend for his autistic brother who (very young at the time) essentially really just enjoyed colours and shapes, and never got it back. Perfect tape for him really. It was that same friend who I first saw the ‘personality 2’s’ with, sat in his bedroom waiting for the Simpsons to start. Funny how these things stick in your head.

From MHP the next obvious step is to start exploring Transdiffusion, and from there seemingly TV Ark and TV Home, via Sub-TV (whatever happened to that site).

It’s very rare I actually post on here, but I do still read through regularly. I built a pretty poor reputation for myself when I was much younger for terrible mocks and not really adding much to the conversation so I withdrew. It’s strange to think there’s all these names and avatars of people who’s posts I read all the time, and yet I never actually say anything back.

Must say thank you to all of you though, and my biggest thanks to Mr. Meldrum for opening my eyes to this weird and wonderful world. I’m thirty years old now and yet still get a bit of a tingle at the thought of a rebrand!

I don’t know where it all started, early memories were the CBBC broomcupboard, I remember trying to draw the “Children’s” logo, and back in those days you had to do it from memory or whilst it was on screen. The ITV Schools on Channel 4 rotomotion was an early memory as well. The boring “TWO” logo being replaced by the 2s was another highlight, and the various changes on YTV. BBC One was always a tad dull with its same silent ident.

I also remember drawing up mock schedules for a made up TV channel (called ABC1 you can probably guess what the A stood for) and also mock schedules for a news breakfast show, inspired by the days when the TV mags used to list very detailed schedules for BBC Breakfast News and The Channel 4 Daily

Anything with in vision pres was an interest, so Children’s BBC including holiday mornings, later Nickelodeon pres, then Challenge Prize Time, and the short lived The Weather Channel to some extent as well.

Internet wise, early interests were drawing up a map of all the BBC and ITV regions, and printing out a logo for each one, also researching the full list of all the variants of BBC One balloons and BBC Two 2s. Like others the various early websites have already been mentioned. I joined the MHP Chat but didn’t contribute much as it seemed much more older than I was. Topics about ATV Start Ups in 1975 that was before my time, in those days it wasn’t the done thing to just wade in in grown up conversation. Then came TV World, TV Ark, The TV Room and of course TV Home. I’ve still got many hundreds of Real Player videos on my computer that are probably awful quality in tiny resolution these days.

Similarly, I used to draw television idents - I think that started when I found out that the BBC1 mirror globe was about to be replaced, and I wanted some kind of record of it to help me remember it! This was in the days before we owned a video recorder, so it seemed the only way. This was even in spite of the fact that I had long since been keen to see the old globe replaced by something more modern.

I'm not sure why I found the rotating globe so interesting at a very early age. But I remember at some point in the early 80s seeing some archive footage of the early 70s version of the globe (may have been one of those Monty Python sketches), and it made me wonder how many different versions of the globe there had been over the years.

It was a revelation when I first got the internet in 1999, and within 24 hours had inadvertently stumbled across the Meldrum Homepage - not only to finally come across a more-or-less complete timeline of old BBC idents, but also the discovery that there were obviously other people interested in the same thing - up to then I'd always assumed it was just me!



Used to do this as well - my one was imaginatively called Channel 5! This was many years before the real Channel 5 launched - I still think my version was better though!

I was obsessed with the BBC2 Yellow idents back when I was really young. I imagine that it was because they were fun and appealing to children, but I also recall being fascinated by production logos (Universal, Columbia, etc.) so I don't know for sure. What I do remember though is forcing my family to turn over to BBC2 whenever the TV guide said that a programme was ending. One memory that has always stuck with me is waking up one snowy morning and going nuts when BBC2 introduced a morning programme with the 2002 Christmas ident.

When I discovered the internet in the mid-2000s, I began visiting sites like The TV Room (or at least I assume it was The TV Room as my memory of its design seems to correlate with screenshots from the time) and TVARK. In fact, when I was helping my grandmother clean out her old Windows XP desktop a few years ago, I found a bunch of RM files and images that I had downloaded off TVARK and TV & Radio Bits in 2007. I definitely remember watching a bunch of ident-related videos on YouTube back in its infancy; I was particularly fond of some of the homemade ident montages people would post.

At some point, my mother printed out low-res screencaps of the BBC2 idents and a bunch of production logos and blu-tacked them onto my bedroom's walls (at one point, I had to take one of them down because I found it frightening in the dark).

However, it definitely didn't become a hobby until 2012 when I bought my first DVD recorder, and I joined TV Forum a few months later.

Yes, I used to do this, it was a bit of a strange combination of stuff from other channels I was watching that day, endless live shows presented by me, and old shows that hadn't been on telly for a while. It was a great day on 1st January 1993 when we purchased the TV-am cartoon library. I was hugely inspired by the episode of Going Live they did from a cross-channel ferry in 1990, so there were lots of shows from moving cars and the like, obviously when we were on holiday it would be a week of non-stop outside broadcasts.

Inevitably it was called STV and the schedule was probably about as threadbare and bizarre as the actual STV during its dispute with ITV.

I was reminded of this thread the other say because there's a piece in the new Radio Times where various comedians talk about their comedy heroes and Josh Widdicombe chooses Frank Skinner, and says that he was born in the early eighties which meant that his teenage years coincided with the time "TV comedy was the best it would ever be" and there would be loads of comedy shows on BBC2 and C4 every week that were required viewing. And I would agree with that, I'm a few years older than Josh but I do think the mid-nineties were the absolute high water mark of TV comedy and I was so lucky to be a teenager during it.

Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, there were debuts for The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, The Day Today, Knowing Me Knowing You, The Fast Show and Father Ted, and to have those shows around in your formative years was quite something, I took it totally for granted at the time.

I always think of something of Fist of Fun in 1995 which could only have existed in that form in that era - ten years before it wouldn't have been made, ten years later it would have been on BBC3 watched by a tiny audience, but then it was on at 9pm on BBC2, in an era when the vast majority of the audience only had four channels. If you didn't want to watch the news, or didn't like the drama on ITV, it was 50/50 you'd end up watching that, and that seems amazing now. I would imagine the ratings of about three million were a disappointment for the Beeb at the time, but you now have good shows like Back on C4 barely getting a tenth of that figure.

And as well as all that you had people like Smith and Jones, French and Saunders and Fry and Laurie on BBC1, and there was still loads of pre-watershed comedy as well. It was absolutely the best time to be a comedy fan. I know the generations before me had Python and The Young Ones and so on, but they never had so much, and so much good stuff as well.

Similarly I always think that I grew up in the best time for kids TV as well, in the late eighties and early nineties you still had people like Johnny Ball and Tony Hart making shows and all those links to classic kids shows of the past, but you also had kids TV expanding into places like Sunday mornings and there was a lot of innovation - but it was the last era before multichannel TV so it all still had big budgets and was part of the national conversation in a way it could never be now.

I honestly think being born in the late seventies or early eighties meant you got the absolute best of television, the last generation before multichannel became widespread but the first generation to really benefit from improved technology in TV production which meant we had many more programmes, but still made to the highest standards.