ARCHIVE: The TV Room
The 7.25pm BBC One junction.
Video content
[00:00:00] PROGRAMME PROMOTION: for Carrott Confidential – coming up at 9.05pm.
[00:00:23] PROGRAMME GRAPHIC: a cross-channel promotion graphic for Maria Callas in Concert – on BBC Two. A celebration from Frankfurt of the legendary Greek soprano, with outstanding young singers who are the latest recipients of the Maria Callas prize.
This graphic is taken from the network feed.
[00:00:36] PROGRAMME GRAPHIC: the network slide for Bergerac. The use of a locally branded version of the slide would’ve been normal practice.
Jim Bergerac has a race against time to protect the island of Jersey from a deadly virus.
This graphic is taken from the network feed. And when the local announcer took a network graphic, they usually cut to their local symbol just as they were coming to the end of the network script, to avoid the possibility of the network symbol popping up first.
Note the announcer refers to “BBC Northern Ireland” rather than BBC One Northern Ireland. This was common practice in Belfast during 1986 and 1987. It’s believed they reverted back to calling it BBC One Northern Ireland at some stage during 1987 (date unknown).
[00:00:42] IDENT: the local COW (Computer-Originated World) symbol is used to link into The Paul Daniels Magic Show.
The ‘888’ text here was typically added live at the same time that the symbol was put to air. Quite why the regional versions of the COW kit didn’t include a Ceefax subtitles caption (the network version did) is not clear. It meant Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales had to come up with their own solutions.
The BBC One Northern Ireland solution seen here is the one they settled on, having tried out some other formats – including having the word ‘CEEFAX’ to the left of the ‘BBC1’ logo and ‘P. 888’ to the right of the logo.
The character generator used to add the Ceefax subtitle text often experienced a sync issue when the announcer/director cut from the network feed – so even if the main picture source sync wasn’t too bad, this text used to jump about a bit at the time of the cut.
A relatively mild version of that jump can be seen in this clip. But it looked worse when they used the lengthier ‘CEEFAX P. 888’ text.
Acknowledgements
PICTURED: BBC One Northern Ireland ident. COPYRIGHT: BBC.
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