1968 In Colour

One of the nice things about writing a blog is that readers will often respond with information or pictures that add more to the subjects that you have been writing on.

I have recently written blog posts about BBC Network symbols that incorporate the Olympic rings, and BBC “polo mint” clocks and as a result I received some feedback that justified a swift return visit to these subjects.

The only polo mint clock I have never drawn is the 1968 polo mint clock¹. This was, in fact, the first “true” polo mint clock, featuring both the polo mint and the double hour markings that gradually thickened around the clock face.

I already had an example of this clock to use as source material, courtesy of the treasure trove of images in the Transdiffusion Archive². This Olympics branded version would have been used from 12-28th October, 1968 for the Mexico Olympics³.

However, I was delighted to receive another example of a BBC1 Mexico Olympics clock from Al Duprés which turned what I thought I knew about this era of BBC presentation upside down.

Here was the 1968 polo mint clock without the white banner beneath it! This was something that I thought was worthy of a “quick” project⁴. So I fired up Inkscape⁵ and started to draw it.

My assumption was that, as I had already drawn the 1966 BBC1 Network clock, the BBC1 caption on this 1968 network clock would be exactly the same and I could just copy and paste it.

However, the 1968 version was a complete redraw and rather more elegant than the 1966 version. The gap between the rhombuses had been thinned, the vertical strokes on the lettering had been thinned and the lettering had been reduced in width.

However, when I looked at the Transdiffusion version of the clock, with the white band and black BBC1 logo, it turned out to be radically different to either of these versions.

This version of the white band and caption was also found on Dave Baldwin’s YouTube channel.

To me, this black-on-white version is, frankly, horrible. It’s a chunky mess. In order to work, the rhombus containing the letter “C” has to be wider than the other three! It seems that the BBC were rivalling TWW in the “getting your own logo wrong” stakes.

Luckily for anyone with taste who happened to be alive in 1968, this version of the BBC 1 caption was not the only one used during this era; I also found a screenshot which looked like this:

A version with this more elegant caption is also found in the Transdiffusion archive. 1968 BBC1 branding is something I may return to in another post.

The clock with the white band was the standard network clock, with the position of the clock low on screen, to match the position of the globe on the network symbol.

However the version without the white band has the clock positioned quite differently, suggesting that there was more than one polo mint clock available as a source for BBC1 network control (and don’t forget, BBC2 was not using a polo mint clock at this time, so if there were two they would both belong to BBC1).

One thing I didn’t mention in my previous post on the polo mint clock that’s interesting to notice is the position of the polo mint with respect to the clock face. Here is the polo mint on the white-on-black branding version of the clock.

As you can see from the picture above, it isn’t perfectly centred vertically on screen even though it would have been centred vertically on the clock itself. This is due to perspective as the polo mint disc sits a small distance in front of the clock. In fact, you can tell from this that this clock was placed in the centre of the rack of captions in front of the Noddy, in the row above the central position.

The next thing to draw is the clock hour markings.

This is how I draw them; in a row to start with, before placing them on the clock face. Looking at it, I think resolving the 1 o’clock marking was probably quite a challenge for a 405-line set.

With the clock drawn in Inkscape, it was time to import it into Blender.

I last worked on my early 1964, 1965 and 1966 globes in 2013, and Blender (particularly EEVEE, the rendering engine I use for most of my 3D work) has changed a lot since then. The shader for the earth was broken, so I had to make a new one:

The bitmap map texture I used for the 1963-1968 globe was not quite right for the 1968 globe. It was too high up. What I had to do was move the texture down so you could see more of the north pole.

The 1968 globe was also tilted at a greater angle than the 1963-1968 globes (which were tilted at 15°), although still not quite the 23.44° that is supposed to be the correct tilt.

Then came the problem of positioning the globe on the screen.

It was very hard to get the proportions just right. In order to get the globe screen accurate I would have had to create a fantasy “bump map” for the globe; as you can see above, the Himalayas were replaced by random Polyfilla on the original globe.

It was also quite tough to get the lighting and shadows correct. For this globe I’m using EEVEE, which is a non-realistic real-time rendering engine, so you can’t simply set up the lights as they would be in real life which you can do in Cycles.

Another problem is that the 1968 globe when broadcast never looked quite the same twice; a feature it shares with all of the other mechanical globes. The lighting, position on screen, focus of the camera, contrast or presence of greasy finger marks all seemed to change based on the whims of whichever Tech Ops person was on duty at the time.

The next thing I needed to do was to adjust the cameras so that the globe and the polo mint clock were a reasonably good match.

In terms of animation, the 1968 polo mint clock was a standard polo mint clock, with the lovely second hand judder that I have been adding to my animations for over 30 years now. However, there was a new trick which that I hadn’t used before that saved me a lot of time.

I use a Stepped Modifier with a Step Size of 50 for the second hand, to make sure it advances every 50 seconds. The second hand is an animation that does the second hand judder and advances the second hand by 6°. I use a Step Size of 500 for the minute hand, to advance it every 10 seconds, and a Step Size of 750 for the hour hand to advance it every 15 seconds.

So at the end of all this I had two 1968 globes (an Olympic one and one with a nice black on white caption) and two 1968 polo mint clocks (an Olympic black on white and an Olympic white on black).

I thought I would create a junction that I could upload to my rather neglected YouTube channel to tie the two globes and two polo-mint clocks I had just created.

To create a bit of interest for the junction I wanted to create some items to top and tail them, so I began by making a 16:9⁶ version of the BBC/ITA/BREMA’s Test Card D⁷.

I also decided to dig out a couple of aborted projects that I never got around to finishing to add a bit of something to the junction. One was the 1968-1969 BBC1 News titles.

I had drawn the graphics for these in Inkscape many years ago, but to animated them I decided to try a new SVG animation program which I’d never used in anger before: Glaxnimate. Glaximate is one of two new SVG animation programs now available, the other being Friction which I also hope to use for something in future.

Although I was able to animate the titles successfully without reading any documentation, I found Glaxnimate rather unintuitive at times. All it is lacking is a little polish; a good UX designer could make an enormous difference to the project. However, I will return to the program after reading the documentation thoroughly. It works very well and deserves a more thorough evaluation.

Once the BBC News titles were animated, I realised I would need to “filmize” the result using my unfinished Blender Geometry Nodes film speckle and sparkle set-up.

This was another long abandoned project and one I think deserves a blog post of its own. Suffice it to say I managed to get it working. With me, necessity is always the mother of invention.

Another abandoned project was the Jackanory titles from the 1960s, which used Hilary Hayton’s tree design on the kaleidoscopic revolve.

I really rushed doing these as this project had already taken far too long. Because these titles featured a mirror I had to render them using the Blender Cycles render engine. Fortunately, nowadays I have a decent graphics card with a lot of memory and GPU cores so I really didn’t notice the render time at all.

I recorded some announcements for the junctions using Audacity. I know I have a pronounced lisp due to a cleft lip (and sometimes have to rewrite my script to avoid certain combinations of sounds) but I find doing my own announcements very enjoyable. I also appreciate people who do announcements well much more after having a go myself and AI isn’t an option if you value having friends.

The thing I really, really wanted for my junction was the lovely recording of Ronnie Hazlehurst‘s Guitars that I knew that Martin Fenton of Fast Tunes Ltd. had recorded. I contacted Martin who very kindly allowed me to not only use Guitars, but also his recording of Freddie Phillips’ start-up tune Bossa Nova.

I was a little inaccurate with my use of Bossa Nova. Although the tune was still used occasionally in 1968, by then the practice of putting an announcement between the starting three notes and the tune had ceased.

Martin Fenton, through his company Fast Tunes Ltd., has released the most incredible selection of new recordings of television-related music. Anyone who loves British Television should run, not walk, to the Fast Tunes Bandcamp site to purchase a copy of The Next Programme Follows Shortly. And I do recommend buying a physical copy on CD too!

I turned to my own files for the remainder of the music. I had transcribed the theme to Jackanory in MuseScore Studio and so I decided to use that for my Jackanory end credits. I also had some Trumptonshire music by Freddie Phillips which I had done an orchestral arrangements of in MuseScore Studio which I decided to use to top and tail the whole junction.

So here is the finished result:

Many thanks to Dave Baldwin, Transdiffusion and Al Duprés for so generously providing such wonderful archive material, and special thanks to Martin Fenton for his kindness and beautiful music.

1. This clock belonged to the branding for BBC1 used from July 7 1968 until November 15 1969. The timing of the introduction of this branding coincided with big changes at ITV, with four new programme companies (Harlech, Thames, London Weekend and Yorkshire) expected to bring some very modern presentation to the screen; the BBC clearly rethought its presentation as a result. ↩︎
2. The Transdiffusion archive is an archive of presentation materials, sound recordings, video recordings and off-screen photographs of television and radio which was started by schoolchildren in 1964 and continues to this day. ↩︎
3. Obviously the polo mint clock wouldn’t have been used from February 6 to February 18, 1968 for the Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France as the BBC were still using the “watchstrap” presentation at the time. ↩︎
4. It was a very long project. ↩︎
5. For this project, I used Inkscape v.1.4.4, Blender 5.2 with both the EEVEE and Cycles rendering engines (GPU rendering in Cycles), The GIMP version 3.2.4 and Glaxnimate v.0.6.0. I use KDE Neon as my operating system, which is currently on KDE Plasma 6.7.4. My projects are version controlled using Git ↩︎
6. When I showed this widescreen test card off on Bluesky I actually lost a follower who hates 16:9 with a violent passion. I like to use 16:9 if I go off on flights of fancy as it’s amazing what people will decide is a real archive clip. ↩︎
7. Although the card says 405 lines, it was during this presentation era, on September 8th/9th 1969, all output was originated in 625 lines and then down-converted for broadcast in 405 lines at the transmitter sites. ITV made the switch in June. ↩︎