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...

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.

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.

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.