Saturday, December 04, 2010

Cheeseford Virtual Archive TV Advent Calendar day 4

For day 4, we come to a relic from the brief period where LWT tried to wrest control of Saturday nights from BBC1 by Bruce force. Whaddyamean, you don't want to watch Steve Jones and his £1000 Pyramid or the Glums, to say nothing of the world's only voice-controlled video game, Teletennis (shudder), or a woman dressed as the GPO Tower? As it turned out, all they needed to own the biggest night of the week was Duncan Goodhew's scalp in a box. More follows tomorrow...

Friday, December 03, 2010

Cheeseford Virtual Archive TV Advent Calendar day 3

Moving slightly away from festive greetings, we turn to 1959-ish, and this trailer caption for the BBC's coverage of the Le Mans 24-hour race. It is the work of graphic designer Terence Greer, and represents an early outing for the Richard Levin-designed BBC tv logo which, quite frankly, has never been bettered in terms of corporate identity. I'm a fan of Eric Gill (well, his work), but nothing in the BBC's post-1997 look can hold a candle to Levin's logo.

Thursday, December 02, 2010

Cheeseford Virtual Archive TV Advent Calendar day 2

Ah, this is more like it. A relic from the days of the only two-pronged Trident there's ever been. Interesting that it uses the staple 1970s TV graphic colours of blue and yellow, as Tyne-Tees did for its colour ident, but which Yorkshire, very much the dominant half of the partnership, never did.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Cheeseford Virtual Archive TV Advent Calendar 2010 day 1

Another year, another Cheeseford Virtual Archive TV Advent Calendar. There's a bumper crop of clips, pictures and broadcasting ephemera to open day-by-day this year, and we open with this cheery welcome from Auntie, taken from the souvenir programme of the 1973 Royal Variety Performance. A tad mundane compared to the various ads placed in the same publication by the various ITV contractors, as we shall discover in the fullness of time.