ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Flower Stories) Part Two: Idents

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Sorry, don't know what happened there. Welcome, one and all, to the second part of our celebration of forty nine years of the bits on ITV that weren't the programmes but weren't the adverts either (so apologies in advance to Tank from the Walkers Crisps advert). We're going to be skipping the Test Card, as there's only really the Simple Minds-purloined IBA Colour Bars and the slightly earlier black and white one where it looks like when a DVD player goes wrong between chapters worth writing about (and the rogue appearances by BBC Test Card F in some ITV regions has already been covered here), so instead we're moving straight on to the big bewildering company logos the various regions used to say "I MADE THIS" at the end of their programmes. Or, if you will, the 'idents'. Let's rock!

 

We're going to be approaching these in an entirely arbitrary order, so what better place to start than with Grampian, regional-churner-outer for those north of north of north of the border from 1961 right up to 2006, when it was subsumed by one of its broadcast neighbours. Primarily known for an endless parade of heavyweight documentaries, though viewers who fell within its catchment area will be well used to interminable regional opt-outs featuring Runrig jumping over a model of 'Nessie' or something in lieu of the final episode of a networked drama serial they'd been following for ten weeks. Anyway, their stamp of quality was this Saltire-riffing minimalist affair that played out to a shrill burst of Scotland The Brave. Not much potential for surrealist tangents there, really.

 

Off at an actual geographical tangent, however, viewers slightly less north of north of north of the border were serviced by Scottish Television, or STV for short, whose still-thriving blend of costume drama and zany younger viewer mayhem was originally signposted by a lion-in-rectangle gambit calling to mind a design on one of those swanky chocolate biscuits that relatives always had, before they went all BBC Schools Diamond-plagiarising with a mid-seventies switch to white on blue abbreviated chunkiness. Then in the eighties they opted for a blocky cyberpunk thistle, doubtless rendered on one of those computers that cost about a million behind-the-scene-feature-friendly pounds to run and required several days to draw three seconds of animation, whereas nowadays the same effect can be achieved by someone with access to Windows Live Movie Maker on its basic settings and a microphone with loads of buzz on it in about fifteen minutes. This wasn't so much cutting edge and futuristic as a bank manager's idea of cutting edge and futuristic, and pretty much par for the course in the era that gave us the P-p-p-peanutritious! advert. And indeed very much where the rot began to set in... but more about that later.

Down on the, erm, border, Border Television carried out their nation-straddling transmission relay duties under the blue and white banner of a sort of stylised 'B' where nobody could ever actually tell what in the name of sanity it was supposed to be. But that level of self-aggrandisment was pretty much par for the course for a company whose nearly every last second of original programming was entitled 'Border [Something]', with the notable exception of theme-song-censorship-stricken Krankies vehicle The Joke Machine.

Continuing our voyage round the 'regions' that were actually technically slightly more substantial than 'regions' before we get to anything anywhere near England - specifically for the purposes of getting up the noses of those inexplicable hordes of mouth-frothing send-'em-all-back merchant ident freaks - it's time to alight upon greener pastures and Ulster TV's inaugural medical-chart-out-of-hospital-drama-title-sequence jagged line hoo-hah, and its subsequent subsumation into a game show prize-esque stylised TV statuette reportedly fashioned out of metal recovered from the film prints of junked local TV productions, so there may well be bits of a couple of long-lost much-vaunted Jack Rosenthal comedy-dramas in there. No, stop scraping. You can't recover them that way.

The mysterious Television Wales And West was the original reins-taker for the corresponding crossover area between Wales and the West Country, who apparently produced a grand total of no programmes whatsoever for the wider network. However this did mean that they could take a progressively bilingual approach to their local-only output, with a bold late-night-satire prefiguring wallop for the English language stuff, and a natty dragon for Welsh-spoken offerings like Amser Te (apparently literally 'Tea Time'). Anyway, they soon got the long-railway-station-name-pronouncing boot to be replaced by...

...the mighty HTV, makers of true televisual milestones like Into The Labyrinth and Paint Along With Nancy, frustraters of billions of hapless transmitter-failure-stricken Granada youngsters stuck watching Ffalabalam instead of something they could actually comprehend, and purveyors of possible the most far-out idents ever to be seen in the entire history of television, firstly an eye-hurting collision of strobing stripes like, well, The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association's idea of 'psychedelic' frankly, and latterly the sliding white-on-blue lines accompanied by what appeared to be an analogue synth thrown into a jacuzzi.

...and that seems as convenient a moment, and indeed as a 'GRRR POLETICALLY CORRECT BRIGADE : ('-moaner infuriating a moment, as any to take a short break before embarking upon a tour of the remainder of the regions. So we'll see you again in Part Two!

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ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Unicorn Tales) Part One: Startups

Last year, you may remember, we ran a series looking back at the visual ephemera that used to appear between BBC programmes. This was hugely successful, but also led to accusations of bias; apparently these days you can't take a disgruntled sarcastic tongue-in-cheek pro-License Fee anti-Murdoch stance without someone thinking you've got a hidden agenda.

Anyway, to redress the supposedly unbalanced balance, and indeed to get around David Cameron's 'family friendly' filters (not to mention preventing Boris Johnson from falling off his bike in anger, Iain Duncan Smith from throwing himself into a meat grinder in anger, and some bloke in the comments box from getting an ear infection), it's time to get all upbeat and positive and bring you a new series celebrating fifty nine years of ITV - the commercially-funded market-driven BBC-rivalling enterprise that would ultimately give us TV 'Spatz'.

And what better way to kick off proceedings than by taking a stroll down memory lane with those fondly-remembered day-heralding Startup sequences...?

Normally, the first thing you would see in any ITV region would be this handy list of transmitter frequencies for your local area, just in case your reception was on the blink and you had some bolt cutters, earth-moving equipment and triangulation monitors to hand with which to correct the wobbly picture before Secret Valley came on. It's also worth noting here that some viewers claim to have found transmitter information every bit as terrifying as TV 'Clown' (Test Card), for reasons that can never be satisfactorily explained.

Most regions would then just opt for running their ident in full - most infamously the 12" Extended Remix of the Anglia Knight - but a couple of them put a bit more thought, effort and indeed money (well, about three pence) into it, occasionally giving rise to such warm-hearted welcomes as this cheery top-of-the-morning salutation from Lew Grade himself.

Even in the early eighties, ATV's regional usurpers Central were still sticking to this tried and tested format; anyone who tuned in before their daily diet of unlisted Hardwicke House showings commenced would have seen this eye-assaulting tribute to the thing at the start of Volume Three of Heroes where the world split in two because of something Peter Petrelli did wrong with 'time' but then they forgot about it and did all that nonsense about his dad trying to synthesise Gino Ginelli and Mohinder falling over or whatever it was instead. Whither the Hurley Bird?

Some of them even went to the bother of putting together a nice bit of film of local 'colour'. Take, for example, this effort from little-heard-from appropriately-named Channel Islands-servicer Channel, which presented a slow zoom in on their studio headquarters to show viewers where the action was. The 'action' in this case being, erm, um... some episodes of Highway every now and then?

Meanwhile, Yorkshire went one better and gave us a Chevron-tastic look inside the building, starting with the Yorkshire Van pulling up at Yorkshire TV (which George Osborne would probably still see as an example of 'BBC bias'), then showing some technicians hard at work wiping episodes of Animal Kwackers, and finally the handy Cold War-esque alarm light used to warn viewers that another instalment of Flambards was imminent.

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 the Granada startup board that Julian Cope claims to have imperceptibly written 'fuck' on in the dust, 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.

Then, with all of the fanfaring introductory hoo-ha out of the way, it's straight on to a rundown of the morning's programming. Here we can see a typical example of God Slot-era Sunday Morning programming, including the notorious washed-out-film maker of learning fun Max The 2000 Year Old Mouse, but which breaks with convention by actually putting something halfway watchable on before 10pm. Surely they should have gone for The Secret Service, though?

And, finally, it's time for ITV proper to kick in, usually with a warm welcome from one of your regional in-vision continuity announcers. Here's Granada's celebrated 'Beardy Man' Jim Pope, fresh from creating an unlabelled 'mock' of a fifteen minute 'junction' into Santa Barbara. Anyway, join us again next time, when we'll be taking a look at just what that mysterious 'G' thing in the upper right hand corner actually was...

BBC Records: The EastEnders (When It Was Good) Files

RESL160 EastEnders/Julia's Theme - Simon May

Launched in a blaze of publicity in February 1985, the BBC's new twice-weekly soap opera EastEnders was a huge gamble and one that, initially, did not seem to be paying off. Press reception was hostile and viewing figures were low, and its brash and visually drab combination of intentionally mundane drama, multiculturalism and boisterous East End humour did not seem to be finding an audience. Arguably the one factor that it had working in its favour was Simon May's naggingly catchy - and cleverly arranged - theme music, released as a single to coincide with the series launch. Perhaps reflecting the initially muted reception, the single did not chart but within months EastEnders was on an upwards ratings trajectory and subsequent singles spun off from the show, as we shall see, would enjoy much greater success. Named after the series' formidable producer Julia Smith, the b-side was a slower alternate arrangement occasionally used for 'landmark' episodes.


RESL168 Killin' Time/Winner Takes All - Barry Blood

One early indication of how huge EastEnders was about to become was the fact that this rock ballad, heard in the background of a key scene in which early characters Oscar Carpenter and Angie Watts were revealed to be having an affair, was considered a suitable prospect for single release. Former Glam Rocker Barry Blood – whose 1975 single Poor Annie has since become a cult favourite – was a regular contributor to soundtrack and library work around this time.


RESL191 Anyone Can Fall In Love - Anita Dobson/Julia's Theme - Simon May

Following a shaky start, EastEnders had grown steadily in popularity during its first year on air, and to the surprise of many had quickly become one of the most popular shows on air. Such was the feverish public interest in the show and its cast that many of the stars were asked to make records, regardless of musical ability. Most of these releases were for other labels and had little chart success, but BBC Records – noting the recent success of Always There, a hit single featuring Marti Webb singing lyrics to Simon May's theme from BBC drama serial Howard's Way (which itself had recently been a sizeable hit single) – had the shrewd idea of asking May and veteran soundtrack composer Don Black to put lyrics to a new arrangement of the theme, and then enlisted Anita Dobson, who played Angie Watts in the series and had a solid background in musical theatre, to perform it. Despite being the subject of much ridicule, Anyone Can Fall In Love was a top five hit, and inspired an album REB594 Simon’s Way which collected newly-arranged suites of music from May’s work on EastEnders and Howard’s Way. Less imagination was shown in the b-side’s re-use of the b-side from the original EastEnders theme single, and even less still by the 12” which also included the original single version of the theme.


RESL203 Something Outa Nothing/Time Square - Letitia Dean & Paul J Medford

EastEnders' popularity soon exceeded all expectations and for a time it was the single most popular programme on UK television by some considerable distance. This encouraged the show’s producers to experiment with a number of attempts to expand its popularity into other media, including – largely at the instigation of theme composer Simon May – the formation of a pop band by some of the teenage residents of Albert Square. Varying their name between Dog Market and The Banned, the five-piece outfit were seen to enter talent contests and bicker over stage prominence across several months’ worth of storylines that failed to connect with their intended younger audience and their musical ambitions came to an abrupt end. However, enough time and money had been invested to make this single – ostensibly written by keyboard player Simon ‘Wicksy’ Wicks, though actually by May – commercially viable. Credited solely to the performers who played Sharon Watts and Kelvin Carpenter, it actually managed a quite respectable number twelve on the singles chart. The 12” featured extended versions of Something Outa Nothing and the instrumental b-side.


RESL204 Every Loser Wins/Every Loser Wins (Instrumental) - Nick Berry

And it doesn't end there. Partway through the storyline, 'Wicksy' left The Banned in acrimonious circumstances, venting his frustration by regularly performing his other composition – or, to be more accurate, Simon May's other composition – on the piano in the Queen Vic. The slightly mawkish ballad then became a major plot point, played endlessly on a cassette by barman George 'Lofty' Holloway as he descended into a nervous breakdown. Quite a few viewers seemed to like it without suffering any ill-effects, and the result was this rush-released single (in the shops with such haste that they had to use a photo of an unshaven Nick Berry on the cover) which ended up topping the singles chart for three weeks. Along with So Easy, the extra track on the 12", Every Loser Wins would later appear on REB618 Nick Berry.


RESL212 It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time/Too Close To Heaven - Nick Berry

Judging from the interviews he gave around this time, nobody was more surprised by the success of Every Loser Wins than Nick Berry himself, who speculated that it wouldn’t have been a hit without the relentless exposure afforded by a primetime TV show. The lack of a chart placing for this single – again taken from REB618 Nick Berry - would seem to have proved him correct. As a result, Berry became a regular sighting on lists of One Hit Wonders, though that all changed when he wound up singing in an ITV show...

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Can't Get A Ticket (To The World Cup), a non-BBC Records And Tapes single by early cast member Peter Dean (Pete Beale), is featured in the edition of Looks Unfamiliar with broadcaster Bob Fischer which you can find here.

Top Of The Box, the story behind every single released by BBC Records And Tapes, is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.