17.02.06
Have the stings lost their venom?

The advent of the recent re-branding of ITV on screen idents (carried out, in a bizarre twist, by what was until recently the Beebs’s in-house department) gives us an excuse to look at the main five channels and how they present themselves.

The main BBC idents now seem to suffer from familiarity. We seem to have been looking at red people jigging about in various degrees of undress for at eternity now. Given that some began to grate after two showings, you can see why we’re big fans of the PVR in our front room. We’re personally finding the whole ‘red’ thing really tiresome – we’ve got dark red logos on bright red bumper screens, newscasters against red, BBC1 has become the colour of blood. Maybe a research group somewhere in deepest Croydon told them this was good but in our focus group the colour drained from our cheeks long ago.

We hadn’t seen all the new ITV work, having previously condemned it without a fair trial. Guess what? Our kangaroo court had it absolutely spot on: apart from ITV4 which is a neat adaptation of an old magazine ad trick, the rest of it is hopeless, gooey lifestyle nonsense which leaves us completely cold, in fact it makes us want to throw things at the telly it’s so naff. The ‘real people’ brief is hopelessly obvious, the typography already out of date and it’s only just launched. If ITV is about being unashamedly populist, why can’t it be just that, we wonder?

Our knowledge of 5’s branding was limited almost entirely to the little clips either side of that Hugh Laurie show that we find oddly appealing. So looking at the idents we’re pleasantly surprised by some of them, although some seemed in need of a bigger production budget. But we can’t really match them to the channel somehow – they’re a bit like a car salesman dressing in Richard James rather than Marks and Spencer, a bit too good really. Channels seem to want to trade up from where they are – why can’t they be what they are and reflect reality not aspiration?

We don’t really watch enough Sky to give you a decent crit of that work, apart from saying that we don’t dislike the idea of the transparent identity. The notion of looking through an ident into the channel behind is a fair one, let down for me by the slightly clunky ‘we can see the joins’ execution. But B+ for effort.

The 4 franchise is a tough one to call really – let’s face it, without the transcendental gorgeousness of the slow-pan-reveal-the-logo stings (especially that fabulous motel one), the family would appear pretty dysfunctional. E4, to our eyes, looks like a purple blancmange mixed up with Express Dairies and MORE 4 a weird mix-up of our MORE TH>N logo and the Shockwave animation. But their slow-pan gong winners have raised the bar for the whole genre and are probably bang on for Channel 4; a bit odd, a talking point, absolutely not ‘red dancers’ and if they’re slice-of-life they’re a very weird take on it.

This is an adaptation of a piece written recently for Campaign magazine by Michael Johnson

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08.02.06
Adwatch

We’re struggling to understand why sanitary towels really need to tap into the language of late seventies political posters but hey, what do we know. Conversely we love the new Virgin ad for their service to Dubai which says ‘soon’ in Arabic. Very neat. Douze points from the Clapham jury.

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