Category: Television Presentation
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Mark a Polo
This post covers several of my favourite subjects, so it will ramble all over the place. Apologies for that, but here we go… Sticking some kind of disc over the centre of an onscreen clock mechanism is a very practical solution to hiding the rather ugly screw that holds the hands in place. You could…
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Wrestle Poodles and Win!
BBC Television, right from the very beginning, were always keen on outside broadcast television “firsts”. They wanted to break every limitation they perceived to be on what television could technically achieve. Therefore first live broadcast from the Alexandra Palace gardens/Wimbledon/Lords/the Olympics/a hovercraft/Concorde/the Old Man of Hoy/France/the USA/Narnia would guarantee television coverage. Growing up as a…
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Whirled Off Sport
Another bit of revision to remind me of stuff I used to know how to do. There were two Olympic events held in 1972; the Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan and the ill-fated summer Olympics held in Munich, West Germany. These would have been the first Olympics shown in colour on BBC1, although the 1968…
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Prospero of the great globe itself
A diary of my return to the world of typography, for the first time in many, many years. Just before the first edition of Wogan, on 7pm the 18th February 1985, BBC1 introduced it’s first computer generated symbol. It was called the Computer Originated World or COW. Of course BBC2 had already had a computer…
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Presents Continuous
Explaining how I recreated the ABC Weekend Television start-up from the morning of Christmas Eve 1967.
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Remember the name
A look back at some bits and bobs I did as a favour for the late, and much missed, Rob Milburn.
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A Christmas Card
Explanation of how I created a Trumptonshire/BBC Presentation themed Christmas card for David Harper.
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Drawing the Curtains
A description of how I recreated the curtain that was used for magic buttons on Westward Television’s “Gus Honeybun’s Birthdays”
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Recurring Nightmare
A piece detailing the creation of an orchestral version of the Big Centre TV start-up and close-down themes in MuseScore.
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Torch and Go
Description of how music and graphics of the BBC Television Schools countdown from 1958 was recreated in MuseScore, Blender and Inkscape.
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Measure for Measure
BBC Television presentation had an inordinate amount of care put into it in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That may not seem surprising to people today, in an era when BBC Television presentation has a similar amount of effort put into it and has done for decades. However, there was a time between the…
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We will mend it…
At the end of June 2023, my friend Mark Simpson from BBC Northern Ireland’s presentation department wrote to me with a rather unusual request. “An incident has occurred with our BBC1NI globe. It seems a new cleaner has been into our Pres suite and wiped the legend with something which has taken some of the…