Roddy Buxton plunges into the TBS archives one more time.
TWW – (1965)
TWW’s start up music, first used in 1958, was the unwieldily titled ‘South Wales and the West Television March’. It had been composed by the legendary Eric Coates some years earlier under the original title ‘Seven Seas March’. He renamed it himself as part of the process of completing the commission. It was named after the consortium applying for the franchise (‘SWW’) and the original composers title stuck even though the consortium on getting the contract, was renamed ‘TWW’. Whether this re-use by Coates of an earlier work constituted cheating has never been satisfactorily decided but if you can’t plagiarise yourself, who can you? This is a repetitive, rumpity-pumpity march, not nearly up to the standard of his startup pieces for either ATV or the BBC Television Service. Even composers have bad days, it seems.
Nevertheless the piece became well known throughout the region and was even released on an HMV single by public demand - something probably unthinkable today!
ATV – (1972)
A second colour start up theme from “ATV” replaced Coates’ legendary ‘Sound and Vision’ in late 1971. The music is very bold, bright and loud,and is aptly named after the Chief Executive, as ‘The Sir Lew Grade March’.
There are elements of musical parody here and the ‘self importance meter’ is reading high. This music is almost a pastiche of the whole daily startup genre with a pomposity factor so great that one is forced to wonder who was playing a joke on whom.
It is indeed the only ITV startup theme written under a pseudonym (‘Aaron Aardvark’) and to this day it is not fully clear who the composer was. Why they needed a pseudonym is perhaps more obvious.
Towards the end of the piece of music, we cut from the tuning signal (which by then had become a list of transmitters in the region) to a static ATV symbol. It is a shame that this wasn’t an animated build up for what was one of the most well-known logos on British Television. The sense of grand occasion is almost overwhelming at this point. If the first programme was merely something for schools, the sense of anticlimax that must have followed would have been palpable.
Over the last fanfare of the march we see a new digital experimental clock similar to that as used by Southern in the 1960s. This clock used mechanical rotating numbers and was short lived, soon being replaced with an analogue equivalent.
It was not until towards the end of the 1970s (as technology dictated) that ATV tried again, now with an electronic digital clock.
After a short announcement from familiar ATV voice Trevor Lucas we are presented with an animated but monochrome ident. This was a shortened version of their usual colour logo animation and was used in the seventies to start any black and white programme. We forget now that in the early years of colour, the odd monochrome programme still popped up in the late afternoon. We also forget that until late 1972, programmes only started in the late afternoon. How else did the Test Card girl become famous?
Scottish Television – (1975)
This startup routine begins unremarkably with a list of the local transmitters in service for the Central Scotland area.
The specially commissioned 1957 piece of music ‘Scotlandia’ was played (incredibly) by Geraldo and his Orchestra and reflected the image of the station and the area it served. Scottish folk tunes, laments and traditional songs in orchestral form, formed a reasonable if rather predictable medley.
At the climax a slowly rotating ‘3D’ STV ‘illuminated name block’ appears. One wonders if the design brief included a nod in the direction of the BBC1 globe? It’s, er, a square world.
3D style idents were more expensive to produce than the 2D animations traditionally seen on film. Computer graphics didn’t really exist in this era. The closest you got were caption generators and BBC Micro equipment used for the Teletext service.
So 3D idents were usually produced from actual moving models. This seems odd to us now, but was normal for the time. This is a practice Central TV re-used in 1995 when they revamped their logo.
Was it a case with those stations who did use 3D idents that their screen image was of such importance that extra outlay was required to reflect that image?
It needs aesthetic self-discipline to judge the STV image of the time, by the standards of the day and not to dislike it because we can do better now. I am exercising that restraint.
The background to the station clock appears festooned with continuous and very ‘of their day’ STV logos in bright orange. But of course. This was the seventies. Please do not adjust your set. This is a quite a sight, in style very similar to 1970s kitchen wallpaper. Enough said.
ABC Weekend Television – (1965)
A mid-1960s weekend start up for the Midlands.
Our final opening routine begins with the standard ‘Picasso’ tuning signal caption. It is
interesting to note that by mid 1965 these tuning signals no longer showed the transmitter name but instead the name of the region. This reflected the lengthening list of small booster transmitters being added to the network, to eliminate reception black spots and thus resulted in too many to still name on screen.
The music was ‘Perpetuum Mobile’. This was not the Strauss composition but a fast piece of light music for strings - part dance, part march and part country melody.
This composition became so popular with the audience that when ABC moved to London in 1968 and became ‘Thames Television’ after merging their TV subsidiary with Rediffusion, the music was carried forward as one of Thames’ two consecutive daily startup themes. It became the only ITV opening tune in history to be used at one time or another in all the major English ITV regions. It had been composed in his spare time by Michael Roberts, an ABC staff member and probably became the second most-remembered ITV opening music after the Dankworth’s legendary ‘Widespread World’ piece for Rediffusion. When dropped in 1969 it was, after only six months absence, hurriedly restored by public demand and lasted Thames Television for another 13 years.
After ‘Perpetuum Mobile’ we hear the transmitter announcement and we end the sequence, and indeed our whole archive tour, with the equally legendary ABC Television Fanfare - composed for the company by Sir Arthur Bliss.
This is the long arm of the thirties reaching into the fifties and sixties, but I mean that as no criticism. It has pace, presence and a presumption of permanence, for the broadcasting company using it. It is 45 seconds of sheer magic and again gives a sense of occasion that has been missing from ITV presentation since the advent of 24-hour television at the end of the 1980s.
The Archive
The Transdiffusion ITV startups collection, so lovingly and slowly built up over more than 45 years is a credit to all those involved with its planning, organisation and research and now its final use as a resource for media historians. I only looked at a handful of the startups in the library but could tell this was a resource of real value.
The fact that the archive was founded by groups of 1960s boarding school boys in ‘tape recording clubs’ throughout the country and all communicating by ‘tapes in the post’, is one of those things which can be labelled ‘amazing but true’. Could they guess the potential cultural significance of a collection of the sixty or more Independent Television daily startup routines that existed between 1955 and 1988?
These daily startup routines were not (in the main) retained in company archives by ITV themselves and at the time of the ITV50 celebrations, access to the Transdiffusion archive gave assistance to researchers planning celebration material for publication.
Did the schools children know what they were starting? We cannot say - but boy, are we grateful now!
