A look back at some of Auntie's graphic endeavours…
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| 'This is BBC1'… the so-called 'watch-strap' logo (1966-69) |
Ask anyone of a certain age what the
BBC uses for a symbol, and they’ll probably still say: ‘a globe.’ It hasn't been a globe since 2002 (and that was, more properly speaking, a balloon), but a globe it was for the best part of forty years. And in the week that
sees a new raft of BBC1 idents rolled out across the network (of
which, more later), I thought it an opportune moment to look back at
some of the network’s earlier graphic attempts.
For me, growing up in the 1960s and
70s, the BBC was always a globe... Auntie clinging onto a Reithian
ideal of empire, of nation speaking peace unto nation. It was not
always thus. Before the globe came the… thingumajig, weird and undescribable, looking rather like a dangling mobile that had been sent back through
time from the Play School studio, or ingeniously constructed
out of folded paper by John Noakes. Whatever it was meant to be, it was in use for a decade
starting in 1953, and I’m pleased to say that I have no
recollection of it whatsoever. It was elaborate, geometric and highly
artistic, perhaps refecting how the BBC felt about itself at the
time. (Swimming hippopotami? This is the British Broadcasting
Corporation, for heaven’s sake!)
Unlike the symbols which would replace
it – all of which were broadcast in real-time by pointing a TV
camera at a rotating model – this early TV symbol was
transmitted from a piece of stock film (one they’d made earlier,
you might say). This proved to be a wise decision, as the delicate
mechanical contraption fell to pieces shortly afterwards.
In 1963, the Corporation cast aside
this esoteric art deco confection in favour of something new and
dynamic, a global brand for a thrusting new decade, reflecting the
corporation’s status as a supplier of programmes to countries
far and wide. The result was the symbol that so many of us came to
associate with the BBC down the ensuing decades: a rotating globe.
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| One of the comfortingly real-world 3d BBC globes (the lighting alone tells you it's a model) |
The original globe was exactly what it
looked like: a three dimensional object, rotating mechanically in
front of a locked-off camera, and for the first three years of its
on-screen existence, it was labelled, simply, BBC tv. A revised
version, popularly known as the ‘watch strap’ appeared in 1966
when the channel was, for the first time, identified on screen as
BBC1 (although the BBC1 brand had come into being with the launch of
BBC2 in 1964). This is the first BBC symbol of which I have any clear
recollection. It remained in use for only three years, until a new
version ushered in the era of colour broadcasting.
The new ‘colour’ symbol placed the
rotating globe in front of a mirrored background image, with the
colour, such as it was, added electronically. It wasn’t exactly a
riot of colour, as this image illustrates: black background, blue
landmass and logo – the colour contrast being deemed suitable for
viewing on black and white equipment. By contrast, BBC2’s
contemporaneous logo was more colourful (albeit confined to shades of
blue and white) and more modern in appearance.
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| 'BBC1 will now explode.' The original BBC1 colour ident, much parodied by Monty Python |
This was the BBC1 ident I saw on our
first colour television set in November 1974, but I didn’t have
long to get used to it: a month later, the logo was updated again, to
a brighter colour scheme of blue and yellow. I have to confess that I
rather mourned the passing of the italic, boxed BBC logo, which had
been around since 1963 (familiar to me from its many appearances on items
of licensed merchandise such as Dr. Who and Z Cars
annuals, Dalek toys and the like).
The new logo, if you can call it such,
comprised the station name in a bland, heavy weight of the typeface Futura. No
boxes, nothing. It may seem nostalgic now, but at the time, it looked
clunky, bland and modern. It remained in vision until 1981, and is
preserved on some of my earliest video recordings.
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| The 'acid yellow' makeover of 1981. With a font from 1970... |
It was given a subtle if pointless
makeover in 1981, with the warm yellow replaced by an unpleasant acid hue, and the BBC1 legend updated to a groovier font (for all that
it looked a whole decade out of date). I really didn’t like this
version, and the vile yellow never looked good, especially on video
tapes which tended to react badly to areas of over-saturated colour.
This acid yellow iteration would prove to be the last of the
‘real-time’ mechanical models, for new technology was on the
horizon.
1985 saw the advent of the first
computer-generated globe: by comparison with the early 80s version,
and, indeed, most of what would come later, this was a model of
tasteful restraint, with a blue and gold semi-transparent rotating
globe sitting on a plain black ground above a faux three-dimensional
BBC1 logo. It was simple and didn’t draw attention to itself. If anything, it was perhaps a little unremarkable, but that didn’t
matter: no one in 1985 expected the BBC’s ident to be all-singing,
all-dancing (or a bunch of synchronised swimming hippos, for that
matter).
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| A model of taste and restraint… only it's not a model. The first computer-generated BBC globe. |
For its next makeover, the BBC
outsourced the work to the Lambie-Nairn agency, the first time that a
station ident from the corporation had been handled by an external
supplier. Lambie-Nairn had impressed the industry with their work on
the Channel 4 ident, and their new BBC1 brand harked back to an
earlier era, resurrecting the defunct, boxed italic BBC logo. The
globe, of course, was retained, but its days were numbered.
In 1997, the BBC underwent a
much-publicised rebranding exercise: indeed, there was plenty of
comment at the time regarding the eye-watering cost. For reasons
unknown, the BBC symbol, with a heritage of some thirty four years
(barring its decade-long absence from 1981-91) was now ditched in
favour of... something almost the same but not quite. The italic
boxes were straightened out and the classic BBC font replaced by a variant of the
blandly ubiquitous Gill Sans – a 1930s font that has been seen and
used on everything from the London Underground to those annoying Keep
Calm And... novelties. This new logo quickly became intrusive, with
some BBC mandarin decreeing that it must appear over the opening
credits of every BBC-produced programme (it was even added
electronically to earlier productions). Fortunately, in a move no
doubt welcomed by the designers of programme title sequences, this was later quietly dropped.
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| 'It's only a model…' One of the mechanical globes as used until 1985. |
As part of the 1997 rebrand, the BBC
globe was ‘imaginatively’ updated to... a hot air balloon. Decked
out in a counter-intuitive colour scheme of red and yellow, the new
floating BBC symbol was filmed (and later electronically inserted)
over a variety of typical British landscapes. This must have taken
some doing, as hot air balloons tend to be, well, balloon-shaped (ie.
an inverted pear) as opposed to perfectly spherical, like a globe.
In 2002, a short-lived new set of
so-called ‘Rhythm and Movement’ (ie. dancing) BBC idents replaced
the balloon, but these proved hugely unpopular with viewers and were
dumped within four years of their introduction. By this time, it was
almost unthinkable that a TV station should use anything as
pedestrian as a static (or rotating) graphic as its on-screen
identity, and filmic logos were now considered de rigeur. Thus the
new set of BBC1 idents, introduced in 2006 (yes, that long ago) all
featured filmed and CGI-manipulated sequences loosely themed around a
circular formation (such as multi-coloured cyclists, and, yes, those damned
hippos).
ITV quickly followed suit, although
their efforts have always felt a bit random, with no discernible
thematic link between the various sequences. Channel 4, on the other
hand, with its eccentric ‘how the hell did they do that’ idents
(like, those pylons...) continues to lead the way (though their
recent coloured rhomboids feel somewhat infantilised, smacking of
nursery bricks or cusinaire rods).
Now, with the new year, comes a brand
new set of BBC1 idents. I haven’t even seen them yet, but I have
seen some of the online reaction. For the record, the new theme is
‘oneness’, and the images
(I’ve only seen them as still frames, but I presume they move about a bit) come courtesy of photographer Martin Parr, who, for the record,
once compiled a book of ‘boring postcards’. Just saying...
Maybe it’s time to bring back the
globe... I have some balloons left over from Christmas and a felt-tip
pen... we can do this...
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