A selection of recreations from authentic sources of Rediffusion, London idents, clocks and other on-screen presentation elements, kindly provided by Dave Jeffery
The Flash animations require the Flash player. Click on each image to view the animation, which will appear in its own window.
Idents and front/endcaps
Following the re-awarding of the London weekdays franchise in 1964, and the departure of Associated Newspapers as a major shareholder, the company was renamed “Rediffusion Television Ltd.”, and traded as “Rediffusion, London”. The most familiar ident used a grey background, as shown above, but a black version (below) was used for the first year of operation of the new company, after which it was used regionally only.
Chris Bowden-Smith notes:
The black ident appeared to give way to the grey ident (the clocks - see below - changed too) on the same date that the CROYDON ‘Picasso’ tuning signal was replaced by a LONDON Picasso - on February 15, 1965.
This was the same date as St.Hilary transmitter added a channel 7 facility to relay Teledu Cymru to S.Wales for the first time, under TWW ownership. This forced a rethink on Picasso wording from transmitter names to region names (otherwise both channels 7 and 10 would have had identical Picassos in S. Wales).
Consequently, with a Picasso revamp on that date, Rediffusion had a presentation revamp too.”
Johnny Dankworth’s fanfare, used with both idents, is derived from the composer’s station theme, “Widespread World of Rediffusion”. Click on the image above or below to view the animations of these idents, which will appear in their own windows.
Here is the familiar “Rediffusion Presents” static frontcap, in the same style as the grey ident at the top of this page. This particular example is based on an outside broadcast frontcap used for racing programmes. Click on the link to view the Flash animation, which will appear in its own window.
In addition to the animated idents above, Rediffusion, London used animated endcaps in the same grey and black styles, reading “A Rediffusion London Production”. Click on the links to view the Flash animations, which will appear in their own windows.
Incidentally, if you think the adastral rotation is a little jerky in these recreations, it’s because in the days before CGI, frame-by-frame animation was expensive. You could save a lot of time and money by changing every other frame of the film instead of every frame. These recreations copy the original film animations frame-for-frame – even though with today’s Flash technology we could do it ‘better’ than the originals!
Rediffusion Clocks
Here are reconstructions of two Rediffusion, London clocks, from 1964 (above) and 1965 (below). You’ll notice that the clock above has a rotating adastral - rotating anticlockwise as was the case with all Rediffusion clocks - while on the grey clock it is stationary.
These clocks are also available as Windows screen-savers: in black and in grey.
Other Flash files by Dave Jeffery can be found in 625: Andrew Wiseman’s Television Room
