"Stay Tuned, Don't Go Away Now"

Not a very good start to the morning (and an early one at that) as I've found out that ITV have snatched the rights to broadcast the FA Cup final from 2009 for four years. It's mainly because of a lifelong association that the FA Cup final always means BBC 1 to me and when it transferred to ITV first time round 10 years ago it didn't really feel the same. However I should really be making more of an effort to visit Wembley Stadium at least once whilst I'm here, especially as it's only two Underground stops from Harrow Halls and whatever I would be seeing there it would be a treat.

Associating big events or programmes with a particular channel has been something that has stuck with me for a long time.
I can remember when a television website wrote an article about SM:TV Live being ITV's most successful Saturday morning show since Tiswas, and there was a quote saying that whilst it was a very popular and entertaining programme, Saturday mornings always meant BBC for people of an older generation and were worried that current viewers would break this heritage. However after Ant & Dec moved on to Saturday evenings the ratings declined and the BBC got the audience back with the help of Fearne Cotton and Dick and Dom although currently neither channels are making any effort to produce top quality entertainment, in favour of cookery programmes and back to back animation imports.

Whenever I see excerpts from either "Going Live!", "Live And Kicking" and SMTV in their prime I get more of a buzz than today's offerings and it's programmes like that that give me ideas and inspire me for things I do in radio. It's just the ability to move quickly from one item to another without it looking contrived or staged, and with the latter it's what most entertainment on television seems to have ended up as nowadays.

However this deviates slightly from the original point of the post as I found this excerpt on Youtube of Channel 4 sharing ITV's coverage of the World Snooker Championships with ITV branding! It's impossible to think in this day and age that both channels were closely associated even for a few years after Channel 4 started it's own advertising in 1993. Then again the same things happened when Channel 4 started broadcasting schools programmes as seen in this junction with one of the catchiest tunes ever heard on television. Definitely catchy enough for Chris Moyles to give it an airing 15 years later!