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BBC World Service Television |
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 BBC
World Service Television. Now known as BBC World,
BBC World Service Television was the BBC's first foray into
satellite television. The service was unable to get
funding from the government, who fund the radio version with
grant-in-aid, so the BBC chose to make the service cable
advertising-based. The transmitted service had
breakbumbers and gaps for adverts, but didn't actually carry
the adverts themselves. These were inserted locally by
the cable operators, leaving satellite viewers to watch a
'Programmes resume shortly' screen. In later years, the
BBC would learn the folly of this and insert text giving news
headlines and other updates to fill the gaps. |
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Clearly based on the BBC-1's then-recently dropped Computer
Originated World (COW), the BBC World Service Television (WSTV)
ident was slightly more dramatic than the domestic version.
Three interlinking globes, plus random horizontal and vertical
dividing lines give the ident a lot more depth than the
original COW. |
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Time for a promo. This promo bumper features a spinning
COW, plus cut outs of both the globe and generic stills to
suggest BBC programming. The programming itself (half
hour blocks on the half hour, the rest being news) was the
non-entertainment output of the BBC domestic services, as now
turns up on UKTV Style and UKTV History. The BBC reserved
the entertainment and soaps for sale to European stations to
be shown subtitled or dubbed, before launching an encrypted
service called BBC Prime which carries the programmes in
English for UK ex-pats. |
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An odd mixture of styles for the BBC World Service News,
featuring title music based around the radio service's famous
Lillibullero ident.
Compared with today's highly-unified look for BBC domestic
news, News24 and BBC World, the differing styles for each
programme and each service now look strange. The
specially built news studio manages to look like BBC local
news, though the world-class graphics and 'BBC Asia' on-screen
logo certainly help break the illusion. |
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An advert break between programmes. The interlocked
globes in the background turn slowly in silence or with
latter-day testcard-style background music. Time to make a cup of
tea. |
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A breakbumper. Nothing special, very little movement in
the 3 seconds it lasts, but a rare sighting of the BBC's
cue-dot. Although the BBC have used this system since it
was first developed in order to help the regions keep time and
to co-ordinate input between different departments, the use
has been a lot less than ITV necessarily had to make of it for
coordinating a large and independent federal structure. |
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BBC World Television Service Weather shows a couple of the
BBC's problems at the time. Firstly, the name of the
station is simply too long and unwieldy. Secondly, the
italic typeface doesn't work neatly. |
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A promo, telling you what's up later. Times here are in
GMT and in Hong Kong time, as this is the very BBC Asia that
Star-TV dropped at the behest of the Chinese government,
causing a row between the BBC and News International. |
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The above pictures are © 1991 BBC Worldwide Limited |
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