ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And The Gingerbread Girl) Part Eight: Schools And Colleges

You'd think, what with everyone always waffling on about pylons and experimental medicines and MURDERS SCARECROWS and folky pagan synths and Hole Hearted by Extreme and all of that other 'sinister seventies' iconography like some lost episode of Series 1 of Look Around You as written and produced by someone who knows nothing about the seventies nor indeed about Look Around You, whether you ask them to or not or indeed threaten them with a mirror-disc top hat to the face if they don't shut up, that there'd be an absolute wooo scary bakery van (for some reason) load of ITV Programmes For Schools And Colleges footage out there. But there isn't, and for some odd reason it's surprisingly hard to find, at least in any form other than a stretched still image with some overloud plank prattling over the top before treating us all to fourteen minutes of a library music track called Ragtime Crow or something, so this has been a much harder instalment to put together than most. And you know why that is? IT'S BECAUSE OF THE 'THEY' WHO DONE ALL OF THE SECRET HAUNTOLOGY EXPERIMENTS ON YOU LOL THE WHOLE OF THE SEVENTIES WILL BE ARRESTED NEXT ESPECIALLY HARTLEY HARE AND SPANGL... OH THAT DOESN'T WORK SORRY

Anyway, we're here to talk about Independent Television For Schools And Colleges rather than RAGGERTY IS HIDING IN YOUR DISUSED FRIDGE, and talk about Independent Television For Schools And Colleges rather than RAGGERTY IS HIDING IN YOUR DISUSED FRIDGE we shall. Starting with...

Hmmm, well it's no BBC Schools Diamond is it? This invariably moderately wonky caption slide, surely not coincidental in its similarity to the ATV ident, would be pressed into service whenever the inadvertent gap between the haphazardly-lengthed schools programmes reached truly ridiculous proportions. Presumably it was intended to have a dual purpose and allow teachers some scope for getting the brightness and contrast set correctly before the programme started, but given that most of them had trouble even switching the TV on in the first place that really was something of a tall order.

Then, eventually, the cross-legged captive audience arrived at the radially-gradated sixty second countdown everyone remembers, rendered in Savlon-inspired Vase-Smashed-With-Hammer blue and white livery, and let's be honest about this, not a patch on the BBC Schools Dots, mainly on account of it requiring those who laboured under the misapprehension that it was the height of hilarity to pretend to 'shoot' the disappearing markings to be simultaneously infinitely more dextrous and infinitely more annoying. Seen here doing an episode of Seeing And Doing, it would also work its Dixieland-driven wonders for the fondly-remembered likes of Good Health, Middle English, Picture Box, Leapfrog, The French Programme, How We Used To Live, Experiment, Stop Look And Listen, My World and of course Jimmy Savile Presents Some Pagan Villagers Make ICI Businessman With That Greasy Side Parting And Thick Glasses Combo Take Some Dangerous Untested Drugs By A Disused Foundry That Is In The Middle Of The Countryside For Some Reason.

And to fill the often not insubstantial gaps between all those programmes, the 'backroom boys' would often deploy short but seemingly infinite loops of rotating artwork, mostly rural and/or Tudor-themed watercolours by gifted semi-professionals, but sometimes haphazard splurges of that powdered water-activated schoolroom paint sent in by the actual viewers. We've been prevented from using any of the above indicated illustrations of The Muppets on health and safety grounds, but if you're willing to take that risk with your sanity, you can see them in all their... something by clicking here. Your best is 'The Drummer'.

And showcasing some of those off-kilter timings, here's a typical schoolday's rundown, so get yourself sat down for a good morning's worth of educativ-

Oh. Good thing too really, if you ask us, as we weren't so much running out of things to say about ITV Programmes For Schools And Colleges as running out of anything to actually have things to say about in the first place. And anyway, it's time to take a look at... well, that would be telling...

ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Are You Awake Yet?) Part Seven: The News

BONG Let's be absolutely blunt about this from the outset - nobody knows why we're doing an entry on the ITV News. It's no more a Bit Between The Programmes than the BBC News, which scarcely warranted a even so much as a cameo in the Four Hundred And Fifty Six Millionth Academy Salute To Fourteen Thousand Years Of The BBC, and even the most casual of readers who's wondering what's happened to all the stuff about Eve Myles and 'Belouis' 'Some' or maybe even the lone Russian reader who checks in from time to time will surely be musing to themselves already that there was hardly sufficient visual depth or variety in the commercial channel's news branding to warrant a full entry.

And you know what? They're probably right. And as this blog's sole existential imperative is to do what isn't right, we're charging right on ahead and doing it. Move up, move down, move round, move side...

ITV's resident headline-brandisher has always been ITN, which as every Chris Morris fan knows stands for 'It's The News'. And, well, they've used that hollowed-out-gold-bullion lettering, or at least subtle variations thereupon, for pretty much their entire news-whittling existence. So not much to remark on there really, aside from the blunt scissor-afflicted show-opening photo montages they deployed in the pre-digital age, such as this one from when Ronald Reagan said "well" a lot about a plane, and the unintentionally amusingly perfunctory end captions, which cynics will not be able to help but notice was rendered in more or less the same colour scheme as the mid-late seventies BBC Weather 'Cat' and 'Dog'.

And speaking of shamelessly opportunistic 'borrowing' of established BBC ident iconography, in no way whatsoever was the green globe at the start of News At One influenced by the green globe that whizzed around between BBC programming. And if you say otherwise those scary green typing hands would like a 'word'.

If ITN ever put on its comfortable slacks and slip-on shoes and got a bit informal, then it was - ironically - with the 5.45 bulletin, whose chummy 'Top News For Super-Pals' approach will have been of scant reassurance to those post-Children's ITV youngsters spooked by reports about gorillas holding Venezuelan MPs to ransom. Above we can see both variants of its 'Chill, Newsies!' chunky lettering overload, first the standard gold variant atop the feet up-inviting beige on beige desk area, and secondly the quasi-hallucinatory slip-inside-this-house-as-you-pass-by-and-if-you-can-be-bothered-doesn't-make-much-difference-one-way-or-the-other-really Blue Jam-predicting logo repetition. Note also the corresponding alternating colour variants in Leonard Parkin's identically designed far-out ties.

BONG Inspiration-depleted writer makes tediously predictable gag about News At BONG Ten in lieu of having anything even halfway amusing to say about the nondescript BONG bombastic film-bisecting typeface and Trevor Mc BONG Donald's glasses ha ha they are glasses or something and it doesn't even sound BONG like 'bong' anyway BONG erm... how do you turn this thing off? BONG oh right, it's going to be like that is it? BONG Hang on a minute... Parky? What's he d BONG oh fuck this is serious - even that's not worki BONG oh alright then you win BONG TV Puppet Hopes It's Chips For Tea - a spokesman for TV Puppet's Human Sidekick says "Shut It You" BONG Eve Myles Tits mentioned in hope it will lead millions of unwitting sci-fi pervs to click on this post by mistake BONG and it's Back To School for TV's Hardwicke House BONG The Grimleys Is On

Well, that's been a bit of an underwhelming bulletin in this salute to ITV's extra-programme visual ephemera of days gone by and no mistake. It's a pity we never had a Brass Eye Special to shake those complacent Current Affairs people up a bit!!3 By way of consolation, here's a rare example of what used to happen in the days before they were allowed cameras in parliament, when they needed to show Thatcher saying something smug then being drowned out by a chorus of harrumphs and then saying it again only slightly angrily. Let's hope for more thrills next time when we tackle Programmes For Schools And Colleges. If 'Maggie' hasn't closed them all, that is!

ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Fiddlers Three) Part Six: Children's ITV

Crikey DM, we've got our work cut out for us here. Despite their long history of delivering quality children's programming, from Freewheelers to Press Gang and beyond (and, lest we forget, TV's Eye Of The Storm), ITV have never really taken the requisite 'branding' for the nominal timeslot for such programming very seriously at all. Normal practice in 'them days' was to just sort of shove the halfway decent homemade stuff out in some sort of vague positioning somewhere between 3pm and 5pm, surrounded by acres of bulk-bought piss all - indeed, if there actually had been an eight million American kids-have-adventures serial called Piss All, they'd have fallen over themselves in the rush to purchase the rights to it - and hope for the best.

From the early days of out-of-vision continuity announcers making the imminent arrival of Magpie sound more like a threat, to the modern era of hashtag-heavy credit-squeezing safely tucked away on a remote digital channel so that we can get on with the serious business of that gameshow where people roll down a slope or something, they've never really cared that much apart from one brief shining moment in the early to mid eighties. For it was then that the IBA rapped the collective ITV knuckles for not taking their responsibility towards younger viewers seriously enough (as opposed to the ITC, who would just tell them to go ahead and empty more bins over people's heads), leading to the establishment of strip-stranded branded hoedown Watch It!.

With its iron-on-transfer-friendly logo - seen here literally ironed on to the t-shirt of this Emu's All New Pink Windmill Show escapee gone one pill makes you larger - Watch It! was a Murphy's Mob-heralding hit of sorts, not just on account of the uber-Yer Programme's On in-your-face window dressing but also especially when they hit on the genius idea of renaming it Children's ITV and duly getting Children's ITV-friendly 'names' in to link the programmes from, for no apparent reason, a spaceship. So the 'Broom Cupboard' wasn't quite as original as all those weirdly punctuated side-of-page timelines in the Radio Times might like to make out, but hey ho. So, setting the controls for the heart of The All Electric Amusement Arcade...

The main, erm, mainstay of the inexplicably intergalactic hotseat was of course Matthew Kelly, at that point weighing up his post-Game For A Laugh options by way of a series of hobby-skewed vocation-proposing Children's ITV magazine shows like Kellyvision and Madabout ("YOU MUST BE MADABOUT!/Trains! and chucking out planes!", ran the Kelly/Sub-Madness Gruff Bloke-sung theme song), and always on hand to introduce that news quiz one with Tommy Boyd that nobody ever quite saw the point of. But he had to go off holiday every now and then, which is when the stars - and indeed characters - would step into the lever-crowded flight deck...

Two sadly-missed 'anarchic' children's TV regulars of the day to start off with, namely Charlotte Coleman in character as Ruby Cunliffe-esque tearaway Marmalade Atkins, seen here most probably denouncing Gammon And Spinach as 'boring' or addressing one of those prats from Brendon Chase as 'cock', followed by serious ac-tor turned perpetual flan-flinging vicinity resident David Rappaport, appearing here in character as a Tizer advert. And, apparently, in the Big Brother Diary Room to boot.

Two extremes of comedy now, albeit two extremes that were pretty much rendered much of a middle ground muchness by virtue of their affiliation with Children's ITV. First up there's Bill Oddie, whose diversion in his post-Goodie pre-Birdbothering void into Dolenz-helmed sitcommery for younger viewers - most famously the inexcusably stage school brat-sponsoring From The Top and the inexplicably giant Bertie Bassett ripoff thing-sponsoring The Bubblegum Brigade - has strangely dropped off the historical radar. Then come The Krankies, seen here at the height of their censored-theme-song Joke Machine infamy, and it has to be said that, much like poor old Russ Abbot, Ian and Wee Jimmy's stint on ITV was when they were actually quite good. Sort of. Just don't let them start singing (He's Always) Pickin' On Me.

More commercial channel tomfoolery for the benefit of younger end of the audience spectrum, courtesy of Derek Griffiths in a rare in-character promotional appearance for bewilderingly widely remembered cartoon-introducing cinema-based lunacy Film Fun, and - stand back Superman, Iceman, Spider-Man, Batman and Robin too, and also Peter Petrelli as well probably - it's Gudrun Ure, TV 'Supergran', no doubt introducing the next programme on the proviso that 'Scunner' Campbell would not have sabotaged its transmission. They never got Nings from How To Be Cool in to do it, did they?

Yes, it's leading alien puppet nasal mucus receptacle Gareth 'Gaz Top' Jones, fresh from drinking some cherry pop made with alternative technology. And what's that? He likes The Alarm, you say? My goodness, what a revelation. Stand down, Dominic Sandbrook!

Given the endless procession of all-singing-all-dancing sitcom-variety series based around the conceit that Emu had a remote control or something, Rod Hull and his glittery blue bird pal were inevitably regular occupants of the interstellar presenting chair, with the requisite quota of "oh no you've pulled the wrong lever they'll have to watch C.A.B. now instead!!"-type gags fully intact. Needless to say there was also plenty of room for the Parkinson-twatter to indulge in trademark non-Rod beaky anarchism, such as the above intrusion into the somewhat meagre day's schedule. Only one of the above shows had Jo Unwin, Gian Sammarco and most of the cast of Hardwicke House in it.

Sadly, shark jumpage had occurred by 1987, when the decision was taken to replace the moonlighting stars of the shows with Schofield-plagiarising 'regular hosts'. Seen here are Gary Terzza and Debbie Shore (a former 'Miss ATV', apparently, as if that was something that you'd put on your CV), in a pastel-on-pastel nightmare which we need concern ourselves with no further.

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 end-of-the-eighties host Jerry Foulkes and his puppet pal Scally The Dog, so Mr. Parkinson has kindly agreed to appear as an illustration in its place. Anyway, that's the last we'll be seeing of him.

* For 'impossible' read 'we just couldn't bear to see his stupid face again, or Jerry's either'. Anyway, join us again next time, when we'll be shouting 'THIS IS A SOME THE NEWWWWWWWWS'...