TV Idents of Yore

It's Friday and the Puumaja Crew is going to be a bit self-indulgent, because we can do that, and rewind back to our childhood and the various TV idents that could be seen on British tv. Type 'TV idents' into youtube and you invariably get a slew of British TV clips, not American or any other country. Not sure what this tells you about us

Like a lot of people I grew up with the slightly snobby assumption that ITV, the commercial channel, was somehow lower rent than the non-commercial BBC, even though it was responsible for some real quality programming if memory doesn't fail to serve. But it was the various idents which were the real hook for me. Since the channel carried programs made by various companies, generally delineated on regional lines, that company's ident often preceded the program Although there was a bias towards programs made in the region which you lived in, in my case the midlands, as there was a lot of networking, you tended to see all the various idents no matter what part of the country you were living in.


Thames TV - the grandfather of them all with the rather grand and strangely reassuring theme and mirror image set up. It wasn't for years that I came to realise how geographically inaccurate it was and thought that the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's Cathedral and Towere Bridge were indeed next to each other like that. Also remember that there was a special one before the Morecambe and Wise show after the latter had defected from the BBC, in which the ditty 'here they are now, Morecambe and Wise' was sung to the same theme, rather shitly.

LWT - London Weekend Television, as I remember took over from Thames around a Friday evening until the following Sunday evening. Well, that would make sense anyway. But I can't be sure since I didn't grow up in or near London. For some reason I'm getting glitzy game shows which appealed to me at the time, Bruce's Play Your Cards Right sticks in the mind. Awful signature tune which was later lampooned by Victor Lewis-Smith in one of his inspirational hoax calls (to LWT as it happened).

ATV - I think this was the company that covered my area; I say think, the graphics used to disorient me so much I'm not sure now, the RGB circles merging into this horrible yellow and blue thing which as a very small child in the late 70s I somehow got confused with the 'Jet' petrol station sign. Was replaced by...

Central - definitely my home area's station, I'm ashamed to say. Not a lot you can say about it, I'd managed to more or less excise it from memory until I purchased 'the Last Place on Earth' with Martin Shaw, on DVD; whether for copyright reasons or not, the ident had been left on before the theme tune.

Anglia - notable for three things. The silver knight looked vaguely like a botched airfix model of the Black Prince that I had; I only ever remember it preceding 'Sale of the Century' with Nicholas Parsons (which I now notice from the Youtube comments that other people had this association too) and, notwithstanding this, something tells me that in a nutshell, the ident said 'the next programme's going to be shit'.

HTV - as a child, had no idea where in the country this was from; I now know it stands for Harlech TV (they get a station all to themselves?!?) so evidently it was Welsh, but the shiver that the wobbly theme sends down my spine is largely due to the fact that it was the ident which was followed by Robin of Sherwood..

Granada - just weird, the music, the strange logo reminiscent of the 'male' sign, and in any case where the hell is Granada, I thought it was in Spain?

and finally, no compilation of TV idents would be complete, or at least not for me, without the catatonically safe and reassuring Border TV ident, which may well have been nationally relatively unknown; I only ever saw it when staying with my Grandparents in Dumfries and Galloway during school holidays, and it always seemed to precede stories about minor criminal incidents or country fairs in the regional metropolis, Carlisle.

There were others - I haven't included Yorkshire TV largely due to the intensely irksome and boastful nature of it's folk, coupled with the fact that I couldn't find an old clip, Tyne Tees because it looked too much like Yorkshire's, Southern, since they eveidently didn't make anything worth networking as I don't remember it, or Grampain 'cos the only thing I associate with that is 'Take the High Road' and the suffering is now too great..