FROM THE ARCHIVE OF: The TV Room
We believe this may date from June 1994. If you can provide an exact date, please drop us a line.
Video content
[00:00:00] TEST CARD: the colour/black and white chroma bars accompanied by the live output of RTÉ 2FM.
Not quite sure why the test card was being shown this late though. In-vision teletext pages were usually shown from c. midday.
A non-sync exit to black and silence from the test card/in-vision teletext was normal. The duration of black and silence varied – but was usually around a minute or so.
If you listen incredibly carefully during the black and silence, you’ll still hear RTÉ 2FM very faintly. But there’s an occasional female voice in there too – not sure who it is. The announcer possibly?
At [00:01:06], the female voice can be heard saying “…great programmes coming your way…” and at [00:01:14] something along the lines of “Just 14 B please”.
[00:01:42] IDENT: the usual announcerless RTÉ Network 2 ident to start the day.
[00:01:52] PROGRAMME MENU GRAPHIC: here we see the programme line-up for the afternoon and early evening. Yes, Network 2 only came on air at 2.30pm in these days.
Normally, we’d also get a chance to see the programme line-up for the remainder of the day – but not on this occasionally unfortunately.
The menu graphics were usually updated for autumn, Christmas, spring and summer. This is the spring 1994 design.
The menu usually remained on screen for at least nine minutes, accompanied by library music. The whole start-up sequence was supposed to last just over 10 minutes. Obviously on this occasion it ran a little longer.
I believe the idea was that the start-up sequence commenced 10 minutes prior to the billed start of the first programme. In this case, with Bosco billed for 2.30pm, Network 2’s start-up would’ve commenced at 2.20pm. However, in reality, Bosco may have started at 2.34pm.
The music accompanying the menu and clock is as follows:
[00:01:54] Catch the Sun by Adam Routh and Patrick Wilson.
[00:04:32] Spinnaker by Adam Routh and Patrick Wilson.
[00:07:55] Eight Mile Rock by Adam Routh and Patrick Wilson.
[00:11:01] Happy Tourist by Adam Routh and Patrick Wilson.
[00:13:40] CLOCK: the standard channel clock. It would normally appear a minute prior to the introduction of the first programme of the day.
Unfortunately, our recording terminated just as the ident link into the first programme started.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Treste1 for identifying the library music.
PICTURED: RTÉ Network 2 programme menu graphic. COPYRIGHT: RTÉ.
Awesome.