Charles Wheeler, apparently
The documentary was presented by Liz Barker, the Charles Wheeler of Blue Peter presenters, and was put together by my friend Rory Clark, the Lord Derby of Farcical Films. Rory asked me, the David Blunkett of graphic design, whether I wanted to put together a title sequence for it.
As time was getting short before the event, I thought the best thing to do was do dig in my bag of animations and see if I could adapt something I had already done. The Bob Monkhouse collection encompassed television, radio and cinema. So my main concern was finding something that could evoke all three media.
I remembered an animation I had done some time ago for another archive organisation, Transdiffusion. Chris Bowden-Smith of Transdiffusion had asked me to recreate an ABC Television start-up sequence from the late 50s, and I thought this could be just the thing I needed.
ABC Television was the weekend television contractor in the Midlands and North in the 1950s and 60s. They were set up by the Associated-British Picture Corporation, who were a company that both owned cinemas and made films. Their 1950s start-up sequence had radio waves, a cinema projection effect, and had a logo that would have been very familiar to television viewers tuning in to programmes such as "Oh Boy!".
Much more fun than Granada
I simply replaced the "ABC" lettering with "BOB", added the word "Monkhouse" in my B12JP typeface and added "The" and "Collection" in the face Forte.
Much more fun than Norman Vaughan
Rory was very happy with how the sequence worked, and thought the logo was so nice he wanted it as a badge for the end credit roller. Therefore he needed just the logo on a transparent background.
Much more fun than Charlie Williams
I exported it the logo from Macromedia Flash 8 as an Adobe Illustrator file, then converted that to an Inkscape .svg file using the uniconvertor tool method I explained in a previous post.
1 comment:
Hi, I remember in my young days, living in the Midlands, watching ABC TV at the weekends, transmitted from a studio converted from an old cinema in Birmingham. The very first symbol ABC used,(for a couple of years) was based on the parent company's cinema
logo and it was occasionally animated between programmes before the station clock and always in the
Start up routine.
It looked like a seachlight at the base and then the ABC letters springing up in sequence followed by the bar accross with the word Television.
On the web it's possible to find all of the other ITV company's very first logos but not ABC.
Hope you can maybe come up with an imagined recreation.
Cheers
Nicky
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