13 October 1986 Central - CITV, Chocky's Challenge, ads & Blockbusters 

I watched Blockbusters every now and again on RU-vid.

@JONATHAN SUTCLIFFE Yeah there was. It was a spin-off of the award winning "Dramarama", made by Thames around the same period, mid 80s.

I'd forgotten all about that ad. :)

@@mrpositronia Blockbusters a popular game show.

@@martinwalsh3228 Can I have a 'P' please, Bob?

@@mrpositronia It's Bob Holness that presented Blockbusters.

I never forgot that advert! :-)

They were still called chocolate homewheat in those days, even though the non choc versions were called digestives, as now.

Central had stopped using the old logo for continuity by 1985 but still kept it for their network productions for another 3 years. Even the 1987 new title sequence for Blockbusters was designed with the old frontcap in mind as the opening shot of the earth was designed to fade in from the frontcap. Obviously it would eventually be very well fixed with the brilliant animated endcap with the new logo but that took a long time to get done. At this point it does look weird to be using two brands at the same time. That said, I don't think the Broad Street studios *ever* were updated to have the new logo on them apart from stickers applied to doors.

I think it might have been due to the regional presentation & promotions department having been kept very separate from the company's corporate branding department. Which doesn't make much sense to us these days, but I remember an interview (on Radio 4 of all places) that talked about how revolutionary Channel 4's corporate identity was when it was brought in only a short time earlier. Before that, TV stations' on-screen look and the facilities and in-print branding were often managed completely separately (Thames' letterhead in the 1980s was a full-width photograph of the actual London skyline, which looked very different from their stylised and visually re-arranged 1970s-80s station ident!). So it's more plausible than you'd think that it was just inconceivable for the regional presentation department to dictate the company's overall appearance - as it was, in the mid-1980s the concept of using a wide variety of animated stings for presentation was totally revolutionary.

@@martinquested5544 I wonder if situations like this is partly why frontcaps were withdrawn. There's a myriad of reasons why they went but this could be one. Regardless of the politics of the situation surely it doesn't take much to look at the section from 3:53-4:03 to draw the conclusion 'that looks bloody stupid' and it probably was noted even at the time.

@@chriswathen9612 Having thought about this some more, I'm not sure I agree. One problem, in the days before frontcaps were removed, was how to make sure viewers knew what channel they were watching, not just what company made the programme. With the big 5 so prolific, viewers in Birmingham could easily have thought they mostly watched Thames if they happened to choose to see a particular combination of programmes including Rainbow, Minder, Wish You Were Here, George & Mildred, etc etc. When I did work experience at Central's pres & proms department in 1993 they were very proud to tell me that in public surveys when asked what TV stations they could receive, significantly more people said "BBC, Central, C4" than "BBC, ITV, C4". They reckoned that wasn't true for the regional stations in the rest of the country. So it made sense for the presentation (continuity) graphics to be distinct from the frontcap. The second problem the stations had was what to do about presentation when linking into their own programmes. In 1987 LWT just (consistently) avoided having any continuity introducing their own programmes, and allowed the "genesis" frontcap to speak for itself. YTV used the programme "holding" slide to announce the programme, so that the Liquid Gold frontcap looked like a distinct but logical follow-on from it. In 1986 I think the cake was probably perceived as just a stylised (seasonal?), informal variation on what was still the "actual" station logo; it was still circular, still positioned (roughly) in the same place, still with more or less the same font, and still with the colours in basically the same place. I think you could argue it looked alright! I didn't think to ask during my work experience what the history was in this matter, though it would definitely have interested me to find out...