BBC One: 2022 Idents

[DavidWhitfield]

I have to be honest - I watched the ident and my thought process went thus:

"Ah, people skating. This is nice enough, I suppose. Oh, the much discussed 'lens' effect! Oh, it's... a woman lying down in a dingy room somewhere... can't quite tell what she's meant to be doing... and there's some people jumping around and dancing somewhere as well now... oh, and they've both gone again. Crikey, that was very brief... And now it's just the skaters again... still just skaters... oh, the programme's starting. ... So what were the lying woman and people jumping around for? ... What was the relevance of them appearing fleetingly over the footage of people in a skatepark...?! ... Ehhh?"

Maybe I'm just thick but... hmm.

It's a railway arch. The idents show three things that happen in that location - skating, an art exhibition (or life drawing) and a rave style party

But there are three different versions, so one you see the skaters and the art and ravers in the wipe. Another it'll be the ravers with the art and skaters wiping across and the third is the art with the skaters and ravers.

I think they'll become more obvious once all 3 are seen, you can join the dots

Firstly, thank you for clarifying. I absolutely could NOT tell that the location was supposed to be the same in all three scenarios, so I appreciate you explaining that.

What I'd say to your closing sentence is - that's fair enough advice to give me - an enthusiast - as I will go out of my way to watch the full set and think about the concept of them in more detail, but for most people, an ident is just that little thing that comes on before the programme they're wanting to watch. I don't know whether we can expect the standard punter to actively take note of different variants of the same idents to 'join the dots' just so that the concept starts to make some kind of sense. If someone puts the telly on and an ident plays and they're left thinking 'ehhh?', whether that was their first viewing or their thousandth time seeing this new ident set, I would argue that the execution of the ident has been lacking somewhere.