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 child, I witnessed so may technical firsts that I thought there was no technical marvel that BBC Engineers could not achieve, and looking at the late Bernie Newnham’s TechOps site it turns out that that my childhood impression was actually pretty accurate.
Apollo 17 (December 7–19, 1972) was the eleventh and final crewed mission of NASA’s Apollo program before they moved onto Skylab. Live colour pictures of Apollo 17 were available from NASA and these were dutifully broadcast on BBC1.
To celebrate this event, the BBC Presentation department created a special symbol. Until BBC Archive comes up with some more evidence, it exists solely as an off-air screenshot in the Alamy photo library. Andrew Wiseman posted the image in Transdiffusion All Talk Facebook group and I thought it was intriguing. According to the members of the group, the symbol was not animated, and simply a still opacity that could easily be shoved into a spare slot in the Noddy apparatus.
This project starts, as so many of my projects do, in Inkscape. I already had all the bits and pieces I needed ready for my BBC1 1972 Olympic Symbol, so I had had a pretty solid base to work from.
The Apollo 17 logo uses the font Pioneer, which was designed in 1970 by Ronne Bonder and Tom Carnase, so it would have been quite a novelty in late 1972.
In the graphic below you can see the Apollo 17 text in the Pioneer font, overlaid on the Alamy screenshot.
As you can see the graphic designers did modify both the A and the 7 glyphs slightly to make a more satisfying logo. I started working on the 7. The angle needed to be less steep, and there was no serif at the base of the 7. This was easily achieved by adding a set of guides at the correct angle. These can be seen in the illustration below.
In the end I found it easiest to redraw the 17 completely from scratch rather than modify the letters from the font. So, here is the 17 redrawn completely from scratch, using the guides I had set up:
The next job was easier, and was to modify the A in the APOLLO text to make it rectangular. This was easily done my modifying the nodes in the font outline. The completed text is shown below.
Then with just a circle and an ellipse, I had my completed Apollo 17 symbol as an SVG file:
All that remained for me to do was to import the SVG of the Apollo 17 logo into the Blender rig I’d set up for my BBC Olympic rings symbol and render a video.
And here is the completed video. Notice that I prefer to recreate things in widescreen/HD so that nothing I do can ever be mistaken for the real thing.
The only thing moving in the video is interlace twitter, but apart from that it’s completely stationary. This felt a little unsatisfying to me. I wanted to create a form-up for the symbol. My parameters for this were quite simple; make something that could have been made as a mechanical model by the BBC Mechanical Workshop using the technology available to them in late 1972 and make sure it would fit in to the box used to house mechanical symbols.
What I came up with was the ellipse featuring the logo moving into position from the right hand side and then the Apollo logo rotating into view.
This would require four layers. A white disc at the back, a white ring at the front and two black ellipses which move into position from right to left. The front ellipse contains the logo and rotates into view slowly once it reaches its position.
It’s easier to show you than to explain it, so here is my fantasy Apollo 17 form-up:
The form-up doesn’t work completely. It does have an OU feel, and there is some kind of cresent moon forming but I think given some more thought I could think up something more satisfying.
I must admit, to me whenever I hear the word Apollo, it reminds me of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band song rather than the space programme. However, I was pleased with how this job turned out and it leads me to wonder how many other symbols may exist that I am aware of.
UPDATE 04/08/2026: I was researching another article and I happened to find this on Dave Baldwin’s wonderful YouTube channel:
In the corner of the Noddy apparatus circa early 1971 there is an Apollo 14 symbol all ready to have colour keyed onto it. Although there is no BBC1 COLOUR branding this time, I do like the stars! There seems to be a square area that has been left free of stars for other captions to be superimposed on it.
Many thanks to Andrew Wiseman for his help in supplying source material for this article.
Leave a Reply