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"Happy New Year, and welcome to Westcountry, your new ITV station for the south west."
"We look forward to bring you a new kind of regional television service..." Westcountry Television debuted with essentially
an extended advert for the service
followed by the film Best Defence, a Dudley Moore vehicle which was so bad
they scrapped half the film and replaced it with a complete different film starring Eddie Murphy,
not that it helped.
This opening gambit was still several hundred times more dignified than TSW's,
even though of all the original programmes shown in the advert, approximately one would survive into the channel's second year,
and that was the news.
"..So welcome..."
"...to Westcountry."
"And Westcountry welcomes you into the new year now with a film featuring the talents of...
"...Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy, who together cause mayhem in the military."
This was our first glimpse of the Westcountry ident,
or more accurately, ident package,
and it was quite a change.
For a start, all our friends were gone,
replaced by the omniscient, impersonal, expressionless voice of Peter Griffin, yes, Peter Griffin.
And as for the ident itself,
while the nature scenes were
reminiscent of TSW's later seasonal idents,
the production was more polished,
the music a billion times classier, and the symbol iconic and monolithic.
These were bloody good idents, to be honest.
I hated them the time, because I resented Westcountry itself for taking away Gus Honeybun,
Ian Stirling and that fantastic symbol.
And also because Fitzgerald, Stirling, Langsford, Judi Spires,
the Suzie Blake lookalike Sally Meen and the rest,
were all like family friends that lived in the television. And that'd been replaced by potentially
nice but awkwardly ingratiaing strangers,
whose faces he couldn't even see
In the continuity booths anymore.
They did also replace Gus Honeybun.
Let's move on, shall we?
But everything takes a bit of bedding-in,
and by the mid-nineties we'd all settled into an agreeable if bland groove,
something like the polite bonhomie between distant in-laws at a tupperware wedding reception.
Unfortunately, this was also when the Broadcasting Act 1990
began again to rear its head.
Suddenly, without any warning at all,
Westcountry was dead.
On the sixth of September, nineteen ninety-nine,
the southwest of England gazed in wonder
at Carlton television.
Carlton. The company that had
taken over London from Thames and
proceeded to
*** all over a remarkable televisiual legacy.
Carlton.
Who'd actually owned Westcountry since nineteen ninety six, along with Central, and had now decided
to rebrand all its new properties as Carlton,
so the public wouldn't be confused,
in a frankly awesome show of nonchalant contempt for the consumer.
The rebranding of course coincided with the second
permanent ITV generic look,
which we in the Southwest missed out on again,
albeit for basically the opposite reason we missed out the first time:
The first time we missed out because we refused to take part,
this time we missed out because
the entire region was the ***
of a gigantic
corporation.
The idents are actually very good,
Carlton's idents always were,
but who cares.
This isn't the Southwest.
This isn't even London.
It's not a particularly jolly place to end our story, but I didn't write it.
Tell it to Michael Green.
Or, even better, David Cameron,
who happened to be a director at Carlton at the time.
Yep, this is what Britain's going to look like this time next year.
But never mind the ***. We all know how their story ends:
with ITV as the least popular populist channel in Britain.
Instead, let's remember the good times.
And the broadcasting titans.