"BBC World is a Christmas Pud..."
So says my diary entry for Christmas Eve 1977 when the BBC unveiled the latest in what would prove to be an enduring line of festive logos.
You’ll notice the date: Christmas Eve was traditionally when these seasonal logos were unveiled, and they were usually gone by the day after Boxing Day, whereas this year the festive ident, featuring the ubiquitous Wallace and Gromit, kicked off on the first of December, around the same time that another Wallace was kicking off online…
Back in 1977, the idea of a Christmassy ident for the BBC was nothing new. I’ve seen examples of low-key festive makeovers from the 1960s such as this early effort...
...but it wasn’t until the 70s that the Corporation’s graphics department started to get properly into the spirit of Christmas.
1974 and 75 were variants on the same idea: a kind of mechanical snow backdrop behind an augmented BBC globe, and 1976 saw the globe replaced by a glistening snowflake, but these were as nothing by comparison with 1977’s comical Christmas pud. How we laughed…
Now, finally, the lid was off the ‘Christmas logo dressing up box’. That same year, BBC2 went all Christmassy with a rotating arrangement of red perspex figure 2s (above). 1978 saw the pud yield place to a rotating Santa Claus face, while the following year brought a rotating diorama of carol singers. Imagination took a year off in 1980, when the diorama appeared again, this time with a group of skaters. The latter was the first example of these festive idents that I managed to capture on videotape, having caught it prior to a Christmas night screening of Fawlty Towers. I dare say the tape has long since been consumed by mould, but I wasn’t the only one to record it, and examples are out there online (see below). This same year, I also accidentally recorded most of a festive trailer previewing programmes for Christmas, which popped up ahead of the Christmas Shoestring.
Meantime, BBC2 were doing their own thing, with a series of not particularly imaginative but asethetically pleasing idents based on snowflakes: these were to be seen in 1979 and 1980, before BBC1 nicked the idea in 1981, forcing their sibling channel to adopt a ‘holly and candles’ motif...
Whatever the state of the art of video graphics in the late 70s, these Christmas idents remained ‘real world’ mechanical models for some years to come. These animated robins date to 1985 and were up against an exotic pink and blue creation over on BBC2 which shows signs of electronic effects creeping in.
I’ll end this run through the idents of Christmas past with BBC1’s effort of thirty-eight years ago, which I hated at the time and still do. I’ve seen this animated fir tree sequence somewhere in the last ten days or so, but I couldn’t tell you where. There’s something slightly sinister about fir trees coming to life and dancing and the colour scheme wasn't particularly festive either.
Below, and shamelessly nicked off YouTube, you'll find a handy guide to every BBC1 Christmas ident of the past fifty years. They start with a certain naive charm before proceeding into naffness, tweeness and tediousness. After a certain point, you can sense the dead hand of a committee making the design decisions... I'll sound like Scrooge for saying it, but I still think 2015's anthropomorphic sprout marked a low point in Auntie's Christmas makeovers (and I can't believe it's all of nine years ago either).
But enjoy them for what they are (or were) – the televisual spirit of Christmas past.
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