We do it #ForTheCultrs
I always wondered how they made the old glass shield thing on BBC News and, while browsing YouTube, I found this virtual studio tour from 1997. As someone in the comments said, this virtual set looks more futuristic than the red one BBC uses now.
I grew up with Dick and Dom on TV and while their brand of comedy wasn’t my thing, I loved when they played Bogies.
Bogies involved Dick and Dom taking turns to shout the word “bogies” at louder volumes with each turn. But the best part was the locations they played in—usually public places like libraries, cinemas, and supermarkets. The loser was the person who gave up. It was controversial but funny to see the reactions of both Dick and Dom and the bystanders watching the chaos unfold.
The game courted controversy (amongst a list of complaints that show received) but I guess it would in a repressed country like the UK.
Stream the best of Bogies below.
When I want to feel warm and cosy, I watch YouTube videos of old 90s TV adverts. They give me a kick of nostalgia and remind me of simpler times when you could hug people without fear of dying. Last night, I watched a video with adverts from 1994 and I spotted something strange. The adverts were from ITV but the intro was one of BBC2’s old idents (the one with the green paint). I thought the video had changed. You never saw BBC on ITV unless it was on the news.
And then it turned into a Pizza Hut advert.
So how did this all come about? Peter York picked up on the story for The Independent back in 1994:
Advertising is in the ‘borrowed interest’ business: famous or beautiful people and spectacular locations are regularly borrowed to add interest to somewhat basic product offers.
Now Pizza Hut has gone one better: it’s borrowed a television channel. More precisely, it has ‘appropriated’ – as a certain type of intellectual likes to say – the BBC2 logo, in its large, plain, anodised-aluminium form. If you’ve had the feeling that you’re in the wrong place recently when watching ITV or C4, it’s because the BBC2 logo has appeared. It sits in its wind tunnel and is swept with green paint, as usual – but then a yob appears and splashes the camera lens with paint, too. It’s a very disconcerting, memorable media-age joke.
But it turns out “spoof” idents have been around for decades and there’s even a website archiving them. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who felt a little off by the giant metallic 2 on the “wrong” channel.
If you’re foolish enough to succumb to the whims of the media, you’d think Jeremy Corbyn is attempting to paint Downing Street a bright shade of Soviet red. He may want a revolution but not in the way Russia experienced in 1917. In this BBC World Service radio documentary, special guests depict the cultural influences of the Russian Revolution.
From Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to the politics of Lenin and Trotsky, it all comes as part of the Hope, Tragedy, Myths exhibition at the British Library in London. What did it mean to be part of the early days of the Revolution?
And what about the subsequent decades of communism and the hostility that came with it? A range of voices from Uzbekistan, Syria, and Iceland tell their respective stories about the cultural legacy left behind.
You can listen to the documentary on the BBC Sounds website (sign-in required).