A Christmas 2003 Presentation Retrospective 

28 December 2003 tbs.pm/753

This year’s Christmas presentation on the terrestrial channels was a mixture of the dull and not-quite-so-dull:

BBC One: This year was essentially the same as last Christmas, though the ‘children’ ident is arguably the best implementation of the current ‘music and movement’ theme. Overall 6/10.

BBC Two: A new ident (a ‘2’ encased in a block of ice moves around a bit) joins some older seasonal favourites for a mixture of old and new. Not classic but OK – 7/10.

ITV1: If you can stand the horribly generic presentation of modern day ITV1 this was a reasonably good attempt especially compared with some previous offerings (even allowing for the celeb idents) and was sadly much better than most of the programmes. 7/10.

Channel 4: Basically the same as last year, though I’ve seen worse Christmas presentation used and the ‘blizzard’ effect was at least festive. A mediocre 4/10.

Five: I suppose that the channel was trying to be surreal this year with a prominent use of a “roadsign” ident based on a longer promo with the theme “Coming Home For Christmas” (also echoing the UKTV “Come Home” campaign to a degree), though the channel used in-vision continuity featuring Ronnie Corbett for its classic comedy night on Boxing Day. A respectable if hardly groundbreaking 6/10.

A Transdiffusion Presentation

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David Hastings Contact More by me

A member of the Transdiffusion Broadcasting System
Liverpool, Thursday 28 March 2024