ARCHIVE: The TV Room
Just when did the version of the BBC’s corporate logo used in the late-80s and 90s get unveiled?
The corporate logo appears in a festive promo for BBC Records/Books/Videos, transmitted on BBC Two on 29th November 1987.
It also appears in an inset graphic in an edition of the Nine o’Clock News from 9th December 1987 (available on YouTube).
We understand the logo also appeared in the 3rd December edition of the Nine o’Clock News.
The new logo also featured in a See for Yourself supplement in the 2nd – 8th January 1988 issue of the Radio Times.
The introduction of this version of the logo was gradual.
It was the latest evolution of the BBC boxes first seen in the late-50s.
But from the mid-70s on, the corporate logo was used less and less on screen – it was notably withdrawn from the BBC One idents in 1974 and from generic news bulletins in 1976.
After about 1982 it was rarely seen except in the copyright tag on end credits.
The corporate logo, by stealth, came to be seen purely as the logo of the corporation itself – not as part of the branding for its services.
The decision to invest in a new logo in 1987 was an interesting one. It came at a time when the BBC was under fire and needed to reassert itself and regain its confidence.
Was it commissioned after Michael Checkland took over as director-general in 1987? Or under his predecessor Alastair Milne who was sacked in controversial circumstances?
More intriguingly, was there always a long-term plan to use it on screen again? Or was it initially just meant to represent the corporation itself?
At this time it’s worth noting it was not uncommon for individual programmes to have their own headed notepaper with no corporate branding.
The first meaningful on-screen use came with the introduction of the BBC Sport animation at the time of the Seoul Olympics.
Some regional news programmes also started to use the new logo.
But there was clearly no rush to push the logo onto screens.
The new look Nine o’Clock News launched a few weeks after the Olympics – with bold graphics from Lambie-Nairn – had no sign of it but it would have been easy enough to add it on.
BBC Breakfast News launched with a graphic forming the letters BBC with no relation whatsoever to the corporate logo.
It took until 1993 for the BBC News to be rebranded and consistently use the corporate logo though it started creeping in about two years before.
Copyright tags started using it as standard on 1st January 1990.
And presentation, of course, started using the corporate logo with the February 1991 rebrand.
So was there always a long-term plan to use the logo prominently? Or did it happen by stealth as branding became more important with the start of multichannel TV?
It would be interesting to know.
Acknowledgements
PICTURED: the 1987 - 1997 BBC logo, designed by Michael Peters. COPYRIGHT: BBC.
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