TV Live Forum

Found this interesting comment under the Martin Lambie-Nairn YouTube channel's upload of the 1995 ITN Lunchtime and Early Evening News titles:

Quote:Thanks so much for uploading these - really fascinating to see. Do you know if titles for News at Ten ever made it past the planning stage? I know new music was composed for the bulletin but ultimately never used on air. Would be interesting to know if titles were filmed to go with it!

This raises a lot of questions! This was the first time that the other main ITN bulletins had used themes based on the News at Ten theme, and they were both extremely good, so I would have high hopes for a 1995 arrangement of the News at Ten theme proper.

As for the titles, surely they'd have to be somewhat grander than the Lunchtime and Early Evening titles.

I wonder if they ditched the idea in the end as it would make all three bulletins look too similar and they still wanted News at Ten, as the flagship, to have a significantly different look and feel.

Does anyone have any more detail on this?

In the old forum, [mention]itsrobert[/mention] mentioned that Martin Lambie-Nairn stated in his book that 13 versions of the 1995 titles were made – more than were ever broadcast, which suggests that one or more variations were created for News at Ten.

All I know is that the 1995 ITV News theme music master DAT contained a NAT version of the end music that was never used. It was basically like the Lunchtime and EEN end themes but with a more NAT-esque resolve. Unfortunately, I can't post it, though, as it's considered library music.

News at Ten underwent its biggest relaunch and revamp in November 1992, with Trevor McDonald chosen as the new sole anchor. They provided a really good opening titles and new studio presentation in my opinion.

However the 1995 revamp of the other news bulletins was simply to bring these bulletins into line with the News at Ten presentation - using Big Ben as the key focal image for all ITN News on ITV.

ITN planned this, after seeing the BBC News corporate relaunch in April 1993 - when all BBC national news programmes, from Breakfast News to the Nine O'Clock News had the same studio design and generic feel to it, just with differences in the computer generated studio lighting and colour changing during the course of the day.

So the 1995 revamp was in response to the BBC new codified look for their national news. As ITN News all had their own individual looks, which ITN felt it looked a bit sloppy for the mid 1990s.

I have never read anything to suggest that News at Ten would ever have changed their 1992 titles by 1995. They had spent a lot of money in the opening titles sequence for the November 1992 relaunch, and indeed they nearly had an accident when filming it.

Apparently they hired a large balloon from a company in Vienna to fly over the Houses of Parliament to get the picture shots of Big Ben, and came very close to having one of the wires of the balloon nearly ripping into parts of the Houses of Parliament as it was a very windy night.

So after all the work getting the 1992 look, I doubt they would have dumped it by 1995. They simply adapted the opening title sequence in 1994, when News at Ten moved out of the newsroom and into one of the two basement studios as ITN - meaning the zoom into the newsroom shot had to be edited out.