ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Here's Boomer) Part Five: Oracle

Well, it looks like it's one of those boring 'let's have a look at some of Britain's disappearing wildlife' bits in Tiswas/Good Morning Britain/That CITV One With The Family With The Teenage Son With The Ned's Atomic Dustbin T-Shirt, and so it's time to grab the remote and - after customarily hitting the wrong button three or four times - have a quick glance at Oracle!

Yes, Oracle - ITV's original Internet-trouncing teletext service, which if we're being honest about it sort of fulfilled a very different kind of purpose to its more celebrated BBC-catapulted counterpart Ceefax. Oracle nominally stood for Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics, and that 'Optional' bit was really what was important here; launched in the mid to late seventies (bafflingly, nobody seems to have any reliable idea of exactly when), at a time when ITV's broadcast hours were already wildly outstripping those of the BBC, there wasn't really very much scope or indeed need for a Pages From Ceefax-style out-of-hours promo/preview hoedown, and so people tended to alternate a quick adverts-averting glance at the blocky headlines with their regular ITV viewing, almost as if it was a separate channel in its own right. As such, and as we shall see, it didn't really need those same sort of attention-grabbing graphical splash screens that Ceefax routinely traded in, and was all a bit content-heavy as the youngsters have it, but there were still a few surprises along the way...

As you can no doubt deduce from the rather spartan Ipso-containers-turned-on-their-side logo, Oracle had an unnerving tendency to look somewhat more rickety and less solidly build than Ceefax, as though it was at risk of teetering over and collapsing in a pile of primary coloured lines at the bottom of the screen at any second. This structural uncertainty is also showcased in an example of a typical news menu page, featuring an almost comically quaint appeal to send in your newsworthy items by post, rare ITV showings for Newsround and Catterick, and the intriguing-sounding 'Report Froms'. And thirdly, here's some instructions on how to could get further info on something you'd seen in a TV show in the olden days before the coming of endless cascading flash menus that you can't work out how to navigate properly. £2.95? Getouddahere.

More staggering still than any requests for postal headline-lobbage or enthusiastically stated month-long wait for scrappy overpriced photocopied tie-in sheets was the fact that people really did genuinely used to rely on Oracle to keep them up to date with the latest up-to-the-minute football happenings. In the hope of drawing in further armchair rattle-rattlers who had thus far somehow managed to avoid TV, radio, newspapers and any actual football matches, Oracle would regularly deploy such attention-grabbing gambits as this quasi-animated logo variant apparently boasting a guest appearance from the thing off Entrance To Hades in Jet Set Willy, and a Video Nasty-fonted Bobby Moore writing 'exclusive' for Oracle. That's not 'exclusively'. Just 'exclusive'. Anyway, football fans should now be grateful we now live in a world where you can get all the latest soccertastic news by following Alan Sugar's football tweets as reinterpreted by Richard Herring.

Some rare excursions into Oracle-hewn graphic art next, and first up there's a TV Guide intro denoted by a telly with a stetson on it - no prizes for guessing that this hails from the era of Dallas-mania - followed by tediously typical learn-to-swim-young-man-learn-to-swim-era Thomas Cook-esque gender-politically-dubious 'holiday' iconography, and finally some Oracle-bigging-up newspaper-dissing facts and figures that were no doubt staggering for the time but now seem almost hilariously obsolete in the age of Caitlin Moran scurrying behind a 'paywall', which for some reason are accompanied by Mr. Noseybonk having a good peruse of his new remote control. Wonder if he's noticed the missing numbers yet?

Occasionally, and slightly more visually arrestingly, you would also encounter a rendering of an ITV region's ident. Though normally, for obvious reasons, you would only ever get your own regional insignia - above you can see STV and Central, both bewilderingly coming across as even more geometrically ramshackle than the originals, and TV-am's that-bit-at-the-end-of-The-Mr.-Men stripy blur (and yes, Roland's 'pad' will be getting its own entry in due course) - no doubt occasioning some disconcertingly thorough individuals to fashion their own makeshift I-Spy Book Of Teletext-Fashioned Idents to mark off whilst visiting ITV-disparate relatives across the country. You could have been watching unlisted Anglia-only repeats of The Secret Service, you fools!

One of the more ambitious uses of the angle-edged artistic effects at Oracle's disposal was Park Avenue, a daily soap opera ostensibly written by one 'Robbie Burns', which didn't so much deal in EastEnders (When It Was Good)-level taboo-challenging as it did those that might have been proposed by a writer spluttering "I have a horsey... neigh... neigh" at a Waggoners Walk script meeting. Some enterprising genius (sorry, we did try to find your name to credit you, but it was like trying to find the cinema listings on Oracle) has preserved an entire 'episode' and collated it into the animated masterpiece you see before you. People really did used to follow this, you know.

Meanwhile, seeing as how as it was really just mostly the same content as Oracle only with slightly different colours so nobody would ever suspect a thing, there isn't really very much point in running an individual entry on Channel 4's own Teletext service 4-Tel, so we'll just mention their even more ambitious daily running serial - the deeply hallucinogenic exploits of existential blue hound 4-T, seen here riddling with some Disney-qesue talking chess pieces - here. In the next frame he called them 'TVS Archive-Blocking Basts' and thew them in a bin.

Sadly, Oracle would end up losing out in the controversial (well, with fans of T-Bag) ITV franchise reshuffle of 1992, meaning that from 1st January 1993 it was replaced by Teletext, whose imaginative name tells you all that you need to know about how diverting their actual content was. Any reputation that Teletext may have seems to rest solely on Bamboozle, a bafflingly popular daily quiz in which The Dad From Happy Days posed such posers as "WHICH of the following is a popular Lenny Henry sitcom? A) CHEF B) DOG C) TACO D) LEDERHOSEN". Other than that, absolutely nothing controversial, noteworthy or in any way interesting happened on Teletext at all ever.

ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Which Way To The War?) Part Four: Even More Idents

PEOPLES OF THE UNVIERSR PLEASE ATETNTD CAREFULLY

IT AHS COME TO OUTR ATTNETION THAT THERE HAVE BEEN TOO MANY IDENATS ON THIS BLOG LATELY

ATTENTION

THISD IS NOT AN ACCEPTBALE SDTATE OF AFFAIRS AND IF IT IS ALLWOED TO CONTINUE TOO FAR WE WILL END UP WHITH THE ELEUIDVEN O'CLOCK SHOW BACK

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THE HANDBAGJD AND THE GLADRAGS THAT BECAME JOHN HANNAS FAVOURITE SUPPER TIME

Well, we apologise for that short break in transmission, during which you probably had to sit through that Butterfly Ball thing again, and let's just see if we can't now return you to our regular programming. Hello, one and all, and welcome to the third and final (TAHT IS NOT SOON ENOGUH SOON) instalment of our series-within-a-series look at the various variations on regional insignias of ITV franchise holders passim, before they all got bought up by Disney and thrown in a burning bin to impress Reece Shearsmith, and indeed before the entirety of ITV itself was subsumed by the unstoppable Chewits-endangering region-scoffing rise of Carlton Television, a phenomenon which as any self-respecting MP knows is a prime example of BBC 'Bias'. Just imagine if it had been SelecTV instead, and in place of Celebrity Juice we'd have all those wall-to-wall repeats of Hadleigh. Anyway, the final leg of our tour of the regions starts by stopping off here...

Where ast tha bin since ah saw thee? In the Yorkshire TV region! Yes, it's the plain-speaking flat-capped cobble-streeted home of the makers of such televisual landmarks as Rising Damp, Emmerdale Farm, Follyfoot, Topper's Tales, Tarby's Frame Game and Matthew Corbett And Sooty "In Search Of Gulliver", which were invariably introduced by the so-called 'chevron', though many observers have noted that it actually bore a far closer resemblance to a 'bird' as seen in a chortle-free newspaper cartoon about Thatcher/Major teetering on the 'economic' edge of Beachy Head, and a five-note brass harrumph through something that sounds nothing at all even remotely like On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at. And, what with being all no-nonsense and common sense and dripping sandwiches and all that, they rarely ever messed around with said 'chevron', and while Twitter may regularly reverberate with endless live tweeting of when it twatted Dusty Bin at the start of 3-2-1, this was very much an isolated incident and you never exactly saw it, say, turning into a 'flying v' guitar at the behest of Animal Kwackers, or being called a 'barstard' by Alan B'Stard. Below are two very rare examples of promotion-orientated jiggerypokery, firstly a standard issue 'one pill makes you larger' mind expansion gambit from the late sixties, and secondly a salutation to any passing aliens that might have been looking in (so, Vrillon of Ashtar Galactic Command, then) with a somewhat overblown boast about reaching a very small percentage of the viewing audience. Meanwhile, improbably, a bewildering amount of people claim to have been somehow frightened by the 'chevron'. What did they think it was going to do?! Fly out of the TV and 'yellow' at them?

The green glowing I AM ALIEN FROM PLANET MARS-esque variant noted above would doubtless have been of great interest to the galactic emissary who allowed himself to be used as a logo for original Midlands ITV-profferer ABC.

But soon enough he headed off back into space, to warn his home planet of the Earth people and their Pathfinders To Venus, and consequently the regional franchise for the Midlands was handed over to Lord Grade's ATV and their none-more-ITV ident, featuring as it did that infamous speaker-rattling double-whammy fanfare with added binging and bonging, and 'colour'-denoting representation of what appears to be Mickey Mouse turned upside down and subjected to a chemical leakage from developing fluid, self-animatedly giving way to the emblematic Zippy/Al Jardine/Graham Taylor-head-shaped logo. And this celebratedly bombastic in-your-face bit of televisual arrestingness almost always found itself attached to equally arresting programming, from The Strange World Of Gurney Slade to Sapphire & Steel to Pipkins, and woe betide anyone who witters over a stretched still of it while pretending to introduce some woeful long-forgotten daytime talk show where the real original continuity announcers probably just shouted "PISS 2" and hoped for the best anyway.

Yikes - head for the hills, everyone! ATV handed over the Midland reins to Central in 1982, inadvertently letting slip the dogs of war and unleashing Hardwicke House on a traumatised public who are still recovering to this day. Not far behind in the viewer-spooking stakes came hard-hitting swindle exposure courtesy of The Cook Report, MURDERS PUPPETS extravaganzas Pullover and Fox Tales (and, according to some, Spitting Image when not moving), chillingly post-Cold War tug-of-rights-stricken The Little Green Man, the sweary-graffiti-shouty-theme-song end credits of Murphy's Mob, endless spooktacular contributions to Dramarama, and the general horror of those song-and-dance prone kids in Emu's Pink Windmill Show, with the result that many viewers can now no longer see their original solarized Christmas Tree bauble and corresponding synth hum without hiding behind the 'sofa' that nobody ever actually hid behind. Later in the eighties this would evolve into a paint-splattering computerised approximation of the original 'globe' - apparently referred to in official parlance as the 'cake', though anyone who has ever eaten any cake that looked even marginally like that requires immediate help - and a more assured synth fanfare that bore an uncanny resemblance to The Robinsons' doorbell on Neighbours. Also included for sheer amusement is the ludicrous 'Central Into The 90's' turn-of-the-decade variant, doubtless intended to signpost a brave new world of Press Gang and, erm, Press Gang, but these days calling to mind little other than Inspector Morse donning a hooded top and buying an Inspiral Carpets 12".

Being prominent denizens of so-called (by planks writing pretentious thinkpieces about not very much in particular) 'Granadaland', Inspiral Carpets themselves would have been otherwise engaged charting the evolution of the Anthony H. Wilson-pointing-out 'G', from its early appearances as a lone 'G'-deficent arrow (to denote 'North', of course), through a brief misguided excursion into just rendering the company's name in the same font they used for the signage on their Service Station/TV Rental Shop sideline, and into the classic Bob Greaves-era A Handful Of Songs-prefacing 'grinning face' Coronation Street-bookender and its later bevelled and Silver Plated 25th Anniversary upgrades, the latter of which is particularly noteworthy for having introduced Show They Can Never Repeat Now par excellence How To Be Cool. And what's more, it used to turn into a fucking HOUSE at the start of Hickory House. Stitch that, 'Chevron'!

And finally, it's time for Tyne Tees, and its legendary Yer Programme's On blippery synth clarion call for 'Gog' from The Paper Lads, and the root cause of a million juvenile misconceptions that 'Tees' was somehow 'North East' for telly. And with tha- oh. It's exploded. Oh well, join us again next time when we'll be taking a look at - wait for it - Oracle...!

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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.

ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Under The Same Sky) Part Three: More Idents

Following some technical difficulties - i.e. the picture sort of ground up in the middle of Hardcastle & McCormick and there was some music over a continuity slide for about forty seconds - our celebration of almost but not quite sixty years of ITV inter-programme hoo-hah continues with the second part of a look at some of the network's regional idents (ASFDFGHDGF!). Last time, you may remember, we concentrated on what were once familiar sights for viewers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; this time, we're going to be heading off in our regional tax-funded Thames TV's 'Magpie' Van to take a 'bias'-free look around some of the more English-centric regions. And if that leads to any Farage-type characters looking in blabbering something about 'national pride', then do please keep reading. You won't end up being insulted or threatened with a hairbrush in the face at all, honest.

We'll be skirting around the West Country, as they technically had more or less the same idents (NO YOU MUSUT NOT ALLOWED) as HTV, only with the odd extra word slapped on to designate the geographic diversion, so instead it's straight on to London and the cut price washing powder-tastic imagery of their original frequency incumbent Associated Rediffusion. There's not much to say about this early loser-out in the notoriously fickle world of ITV regional franchise reshuffles, other than that they made some fascinating-sounding programmes that are now almost entirely wiped and a load of old dross that now almost entirely survives in full, and that the rights to the name were later bought up by media terrorism wheel-inventer Victor Lewis-Smith, who still uses it at the end of all his Discovery Channel documentaries about Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Ten Best Harmoniums or whatever it is. Bibbly bome?

The hapless AR-TV's regional usurper, for weekdays at least, was Thames, regarded by some as the most successful, prolific and consistently high quality ITV broadcaster of all time, which of course made it the prime candidate for being replaced by Carlton in suspiciously political circumstances and for belief-beggaringly spurious 'reasons' in a move that pretty much resulted in the long-term collapsing in on itself of the whole of ITV. The iconic buildings-rising-out-of-the-water sequence and London-Bridge-is-falling-down-gone-copyright-averting jingle were there from the outset, and they of course proved to be eminently parodyable by the station's more anarchic stars; witness the numerous intrusions by Dick Emery, Kenny Everett et al, the never-amusing "Here they are now/Morecambe And Wise" gambit, and the one we've chosen to illustrate the point here, taken from one of Pauline Quirke's innumerable 'kids go crazy!!' unbroadcastably unfunny sketch shows. Plus they never did a Bob Cryer Rising Out Of The Water one for The Bill, so we really don't care, frankly. Possibly more of interest is the 'Thames Goes Midnight' variant originally used to bookend legendarily younger viewer-freaking anthology series of Faceless Nun/Shadow Sitting In Chair Opening Titles infamy Armchair Thriller, and subsequently adapted with genre-denoting splurges of blocky text for movie presentations such as Tough Guys, Murder Mystery & Suspense, the League Of Gentlemen-championed Appointment With Fear and the brilliantly tin-say-doer The Hollywood Movie. Sadly the projected seasons of A Bit Like A Carry On Film But Really Badly Directed, Zombies Cannibal Psycho Lesbians And Things Ripped Off From Alien But Not Closely Enough So Laywers Would Notice and Them Films Like Hollywood Shuffle And Nice Girls Don't Explode That Everyone Got Out On Video In The Late Eighties But Nobody Can Remember Anything About Now never made it past the drawing board.

Meanwhile, from 7pm on Fridays it was Party Time, as London Weekend Television took over the reins for forty eight and a bit hours of fun (AND Blind Date!). The inaugural 'supermarket own brand fizzy orange' design soon gave way to the familiar toothpaste doodle and accompanying accelerated bingbong fanfare,which presented the logical paradox of clearly signposting to the viewer that a couple of ad breaks' worth of energetic zaniness was in the offing, albeit to such an extent that most of said purveyors of energetic zaniness didn't consider it neccessary to indulge in any additional Thames-style tampering. One rare and notable exception to this was the late seventies take on Just William, seen here being 'anarchic'.

Anglia's programming was of course introduced by this notorious revolving flag-waving pewter knight on horseback, interminably rotating to the strains of the 12" Extended Megamix of Handel's Water Music, which may well have lasted for longer than the actual editions of Sale Of The Century and Tales Of The Unexpected that it prefaced, but unfortunately nobody has ever been able to check as viewers have invariably gone off to allieviate the effects of time appearing to stand still by enjoying a seven course meal interspersed with showings of the original rough cut of Dune by the time it finishes. And yes, if you chisel away all of those appended hallucinogenic deviations, this is indeed a joke that has been made dozens of times before; that's the problem with the 'big hitter' ITV idents (NO THEI PROBELM IS A DIFRDENT PROBLEM PRLBLEM), as they're so overexposed and widely comically riffed upon that it's hard to come up with anything new or original to say about them. What we need, really, is something totally obscure, forgotten, and logistically bewildering, and it's not like one of those is about to come sailing in on a great big boat or anything.

The aptly-named Westward manned the ruralist-pluralist transmitters during ITV's earlier days, maintaining a shadowy off-radar presence that rarely made itself known to the wider world outside of those listings at the back of Look-In, and indeed is still fondly spoken of in hushed tones to this day by mouth-frothing planks who blame the BBC and 'mosques' for the accidental editing of three seconds from an ad break still on the DVD of The Complete Incomplete Two In Clover. Their logo was a Those Biscuits Posh Relatives Always Have-evoking sailing ship design in no way influenced by Tony Hart's Blue Peter logo honest, later bolstered by the addition of what appears to be Captain Halley's Galleon from Star Fleet.

Westward's successor, TSW, made an immediate splash with a celebratedly disastrous and oft-clipped opening night spectacular, and then went on to do absolutely nothing of note at any point whatsoever, with the notable exception of a couple of Saturday morning shows which, if we're being honest about it, only served to paradoxically prove the 'absolutely nothing of note' maxim. Whether this was in any way reflected by their humdrum eucalyptus leaf-themed insignia (IT IS STILML AN IDNEFT) is something that decency prevents us from speculating on.

Meanwhile Channel, who were pretty much the dictionary definition of 'get the transmitters working then go home' (not that there would be much competition for that definition, mind), produced so little in the way of original programming that their idents (THFS IS HAS GONE ON LONG ENIUFG ENOUGH) remain a mystery to the mainland people and their mainland ways. With that in mind, we are proud to reveal here that they deployed, in chronological order, what appears to be a leopard playing Blockbusters, and subsequently a bisected Blue Riband rearranged into letter-resembling shapes. A side of Channel Island life that was not really captured in Appointment With Venus.

Southern, in contrast, straddled the entire spectrum of excitement levels, from plucky mod-attired sub-James Bond teen spy antics with Bill, Terri and The One With The Hair in Freewheelers, to the mind-numbing tedium of sluggish clipclopping horse and dreary clipclopping acoustic guitar-heralded Jack Hargreaves-fronted arts and crafts interminablism Out Of Town. Somewhere between came Jon Pertwee banging on about a fishwasher or something. And, for no readily obvious reason, they chose to introduce all of their output with the above quasi-religious imagery in a sequence that appears to have provided the entire inspiration for Look Around You.

Southern's short-stay replacement TVS went for this 'WH Smith for all your printer needs'-style iconography that cleverly evoked both the 'T' and the 'V', but not, erm, the 'S'. For a while they were the number one go-to provider of bewildering weekend afternoon programming that you probably thought you'd just imagined, from The Boy Who Won The Pools, The Witches & Grinnygog, On Safari and Knights Of God to Mr Majeika, A Beetle Called Derek, The Selling Of Noddy and, but of course, Ultra Quiz. Then they lost the franchise and their archive changed hands several times until it wound up with Disney, who promptly trashed all of the paperwork preventing anybody from obtaining clearance to repeat or release any of it, and have reportedly more recently started trashing the tapes. If they've been anywhere near Henry's Leg with a big magnet rest assured I will personally break that bastard mouse's legs and use his face to scrape the rust off the carefully hidden prints of Uncle Walt's less than racially-enlightened animations. How's about that for 'facts'?

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 find any motivation to do anything other than break this particular massive long post in two, 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.

NO WE HAVE ALUEADFY SAID

ALREAYD

TEREH WILL BE NO MORE ABOUT IDNETAGSF

BILLY CONMIOLU

CONNOLLY

STOP

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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.