ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Roland's Countdown To Christmas): Christmas Special!

Merry Christmas! If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may well remember that, earlier in the year, we ran a special series of articles looking at ITV's inter-programme iconography of years gone by, which took in startup sequences, IDEANTS, MORE IDENATS, EVEN MORE IDENEATASF, Oracle, Children's ITV, The News, Schools And Colleges, TV-am and Channel 4, and - but of course - Continuity Slides. You may also recall that the previous year, we ran a similar series about the BBC, ending with a Christmas Special that opened with an impassioned plea to defend the BBC against the machinations of politicians and media moguls with your bare hands if you have to.

This corresponding look at ITV's old-skool festive trimmings will thus correspondingly open with an impassioned plea to, um, watch ITV every now and then when some thing that you think looks quite good from the trailer but then turns out to actually be a bit boring when you see it though it used to be good when they had Spitting Image and The Equalizer or something is on. Yes, there's not really that much shouting to do, so instead let's get straight on with the utterly respectful and thoroughly technically detailed celebrating of the golden age of TV continuity...

Needless to say, it was pretty much par for the course for the regional ITV companies to add a bit of seasonal snazz to their all-too-familiar idents (NO THIS MU ST NOT RTEMBER THE REAL REASONS WE CELEBNRATE CHRISTHMAS IT IS NOT BECAUSE NELE). Up at the top there you can see Yorkshire's bird-tastic 'Chevron' caught in a sudden downpour of snow, LWT's bing-bonging racially dubious sitcom-bookending letters caught under a deluge of, erm, snow, Granada at least having the gritty northern integrity to use a bit of frost instead of all that snow them namby pamby Southerners are all wearing now (yes, we know Yorkshire isn't in the 'South', but try telling that to a born and bred Granadalander), Central going overboard with the satin and tat and inadvertently turning their famed 'world' into something resembling a sought-after ancient artefact with mystical powers in a mid-eighties post-Indiana Jones adventure movie, and finally those inverterate scrooges at Ulster casually adorning their usual insignia with the sort of lazy colour scheme and iconography that you'd more normally find on a generic sharp-cornered Christmas Card sent to you by a local business that you'd briefly spoken to on the phone back in February but they've forgotten to put your name in it anyway. Yeah, Deck The Halls.

One peculiar offshoot of this was that the regional companies became bizarrely obsessed with using their idents (DONT FEED THE NELE DONT LET HIM KNOW ITS CHIRISMTAS TIME AGAIN) as putative wrapping paper patterns. At the top we can see a particularly HTV-obsessed Teddy, doubtless hoping that Santa has brought him a DVD of a celebrated HTV-sourced supernatural children's serial which comes with a book about all those sort of shows written by someone not a million miles from here, and below that Central breaking out the lavish opulence to suggest that all manner of lavish blockbusting high-spectacle programming was bursting to get out from beneath that paper. And exactly what lavish blockbusting high-spectacle programming did they have in store for us that Christmas...?

Oh.

If you were lucky, the continuity announcers in your region would similarly make an effort and loosen their ties by, ironically, straightening their ties a bit. Here's Granada's top levity-merchant Colin Weston bidding viewers a jolly Yuletide...

...and Charles Foster's getting nattily in on the act too...

Hang on a minute... Parky? What's he doing here?! Don't start adjusting your set just yet - unfortunately, despite extensive research, it's proved impossible to locate an image of fellow Granada anchor Jim 'Beardy Man' Pope doing his trademark 'refreshed' fivedollarsgedouddahere late night bit to camera, so Mr. Parkinson has generously agreed to appear as an illustration in its place. Anyway, that's the last we'll be seeing of him.

Some regions were so giddy with Advent excitement that they'd even stump up the readies for a full-on animated Christmassy trailer, which makes it all the more ironic that this particular example from TVS should be so breezily fanfaring the company that would later buy the rights to their archive then promptly trash all the paperwork so that nobody could repeat or release any of the programmes even if they could navigate all the labyrinthine rights clearances and disproportionate licensing fees surrounding forgotten videotaped studiobound nonsense from the past that only about three people on The Mausoleum Club would be interested in buying on DVD in the first place anyway. And if that bastard mouse has been anywhere near The Boy Who Won The Pools with a big magnet, it'll be Song Of The South, The Story Of Menstruation and Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors on a loop on Christmas Day next year

Anyway, what festive delights from the TVS archive are Walt's boys currently blocking access to...?

Oh.

ITV as a whole would even sometimes fork out for its own generic one-size-fits-all Let's Get The Regions Together overarching animated promos, such as this one featuring a dilapidated Santa apparently played by a melted TV 'Ernie' (Sesame Street), and the below slightly more classy one which appears to feature the houses from the Rainbow title sequence being visited by Peter Petrelli and Sylar after they'd acquired that 'light' power that was in the Volume Three publicity material but then never featured in the show itself. Put a sock in it, 'Mohinder'.

And from three wildly disparate years (well, sort of), here are a couple of examples of how they routinely introduced their programming on the three Festive Big Guns. As you can clearly see, the ITV scheduling cards were somewhat slightly bigger on razzle-dazzle, iconographic tradition and indeed overall coherency than the equivalent offerings from the BBC.

Until, that was, the late eighties, when they suddenly got all abstract and computer graphical and subsequently never quite managed to recapture that lost impact, as can be seen above with the rather inappropriate choice of present for an ITV viewer of the BBC Globe, and the Swatch-esque counterpart to the Oh Fuck Off-era BBC2 logo. Can we move on to the next bit now? Thanks.

Those zany funsters at ITN were always first to jump on the Christmas bandwagon, as can be seen from their logo's wanderings in a giant snowflake-bedecked Winter Wonderland which perhaps didn't sit too comfortably with the latest updates about industrial unrest and hostage dramas, and from the year that one of their 'backroom boys' learned how to do a SCREEN$ on the ZX Spectrum. BONG Ninja steals computer disc from Research Centre BONG Blue Head On Legs evades Park Keepers for third day running BONG An attempt to attack Thorin with the Troll's Path is prevented by Not Being Able To Fucking Type BONG Can we stop now? BONG Alright pack it in or I'll start repeating my claim to have once finiBONGshed Bugaboo The Flea by hitting all the keys in frustration BONG right you fucker I'm BONG pulling the power supply out BONG yeah, not so Robot Voice now, are you?

Surprisingly, given how obsessed they were with the glitz and glamour (albeit glitz and glamour affixed to shoddy makeshift studio walls that fell over while someone cued up the wrong camera) all year round, TV-am were bafflingly subdued when it came to Christmastime, usually with just a tree and couple of decorations up in the studio and a couple of festively-themed items and caption card-trimmings per day. As you can see, the average late December schedule wasn't exactly overflowing with bluntly-named Holly And Ivy-evoking programme subdivisions, though hands up who initially misread that as 'Christmas Cockney'. Though of course there was the year that they put on Roland's Countdown To Christmas, a whole twenty four days' worth of Nyeh-Hehhhhh-fuelled advent calendar opening with nary a cricket bat in si*SMOOOSH*

Oh Channel 4. How well you started, with even the standard issue snow on the logo somehow managing to look arty and new and vital, but then you had to get all low-key and 'tasteful' and... well, we don't even like to think about the later years. But there's one thing we just can't help but mention...

Yes of course, it's 1987's 'Yes Of Course - Christmas On 4!' robots! Quite what possessed anyone to headlight the Festive Season with a bunch of smug trapped-finger-inviting sub-CP & Qwikstitch rickety Royal Bank Of Scotland-esque animated automatons playing a game of charades in which they were apparently required to guess the identity of specific generic times of year on overall channels rather than programme titles is anyone's guess, but they introduced those omnibus repeats of Dick Spanner like nobody's business. And let's see just what Christmassy fun Channel 4 had in store for us that year...

Oh.

Anyway, overall, this has been rather a fun trip through the outer reaches of the archives, if not quite as enjoyable nor indeed as funny as the BBC one was, and if that's not a metaphor for something very pertinent then frankly we don't know what is. And sorry about those intrusions into the text earlier. The IBA inform us that normal service has now been resumed.

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If you've enjoyed this article, you can find lots more about stuff you just don't see on television any more in Not On Your Telly, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

They Could Have Been A Bit Like The Beatles: Madonna 'Dear Jessie'

3. Madonna 'Dear Jessie'

 

Sing This All Together (See What Happens): Even in her earliest days, there'd always been an adventurous streak in both Madonna's music and lyrics that had marked her out from the average non-Madonna in the eighties pop firmament, and after splitting with Sean Penn she suddenly went diversification-crazy, flirting (in both senses) with all kinds of genres in an adventurous yet highly commercial manner. As a lot of these sponsorship-friendly experiments involved something of a 'sixties' tinge (notably Cherish), and she'd taken to showing off to all and sundry about how the first record she bought was Strawberry Alarm Clock's Incense And Peppermints, a full-on voyage to Freak Out City was only a matter of time away. NINE POINTS.

Brought His Mellotrode And Freaked 'Em All Out: Hmmm, well, it's hardly Incense And Peppermints (or even Tomorrow or Sit With The Guru for that matter), being about as far away from the sound of the ice-cream-splattered overdressed lot who produced her first pop purchase as it's possible to be and sounding more like the sort of bandwagon-jumping records that were made by tinkly High School Hop-era types like Lesley Gore and The Cascades when they realised their number was well and truly up with a paisley-patterned vengeance, with a bit of proto-Phoebe Buffay drippy-hippy singer-songwriteryness thrown in for good measure. Which probably isn't THAT far in literal musical terms, but you get the point. Still, there's loads of chimes, fairground organ, one of those things that goes 'swwwwwwwwwiiish', some guitar work that sounds like The Paul Butterfield Blues Band writing music for Camberwick Green, a waltz-time acoustic diversion, extemporising baroque string outro, and - but of course - Penny Lane trumpet. And it all fades into a 'transistor radio' sound at the end too. Gear! SEVEN POINTS.

On The Bus Or Off The Bus?: Oh dear. After years and years of grabbing international headlines by breaking lyrical taboos in a calculatedly progressive way, she gets the chance to go psychedelic and blows 'it' instead of 'our minds'. It's nursery rhyme-level references to dancing moons, mermaids, fountains of gold, candy kisses, and indeed - in the first worrying note of Disneyism to trouble us here - pink elephants and lemonade all the way here. The laughable thing is it's not even as lyrically arresting as Pink Elephants On Parade. Nice and evocative and all that but... oh Madonna, how you failed us all. TWO POINTS.

The Green And Purple Lights Affect Your Sight: And it gets worse. From 'free love' to slovenly dress to twelve hour country-rock blues soloing to murdering actresses after 'hearing' hidden messages in pop songs, there's certainly a case for claiming that on the whole America didn't quite 'get' psychedelia, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in their adoption of Fantasia, rather than The Magic Roundabout, as an unintentional yet apposite visual encapsulation of all that is far-out and mind-blowing (though whether this extends to the live action orchestra bit with hallucinatoriness' own Deems Taylor has never been established). And yes, it's said overlong animated pomp that Madonna draws her visual cues from, with cutesy 'storybook' imagery, forties-faced dancing teapots, and herself as a kind of cheaply made ripoff variant of Tinkerbell a confused relative might have bought from the local 'discount store'. As if to labour the point, she wore a pair of Minnie Mouse ears in the promo photos too. Hanna-Barbera was under your nose the whole time, you fools! TWO POINTS, granted reluctantly due to a presumably accidental echo of the opening of The Adventures Of Rupert Bear in one of the live action bits.

I'm Picking Up Bad Vibrations: Dear Jessie was, inevitably, a massive hit, and even in the midst of the Christmas market (with a load of eighties-retrospecting to overshadow it to boot) it managed to reach a more than respectable number five in the UK. It's been strangely conspicuous by its absence from Madonna's Greatest Hits-type collections, but even that in a way kind of echoes the way her sixties forebears used to conveniently 'forget' their psychedelic excursions once the pension plan compilation came along. And let's not forget Chris Morris' hilarious attempt to whip up a moral panic based on the hidden 'drug' message when the song is played backwards in On The Hour. FIVE POINTS.

Ha Ha Ha... We Blew Your Mind!: The 'sixties' thing may have only been a momentary excursion for Madonna, but it certainly gave her a commendable taste for the avant-garde. The next twelve months alone brought the avant-garde-sounding Vogue (which she originally considered too angular to release as a single), the fucking terrifying Justify My Love (let's not even get started on what happens when you play THAT backwards), and the just plain inexplicable Hanky Panky. Having sung about her arse at such length in the latter, she then went on to spend the next couple of years shoving it into every camera lens available, but still managed to rediscover her psychedelic muse, with such top-notch offerings as Ray Of Light and the not-at-all-copied-from-She-Comes-In-Colours-By-Love-Honest Beautiful Stranger. To be honest she's never really been given enough credit in this regard. NINE POINTS. Which nets her an arse-baring THIRTY FOUR POINTS.


Next Time - the Kane brothers wig out with a little help from TV 'Lister' (Red Dwarf)