Sometimes You Need a Little Finesse: Late Night LWT junctions and ads, February 1991 скачать в хорошем качестве

Sometimes You Need a Little Finesse: Late Night LWT junctions and ads, February 1991

More Late Night Hot from the files of Christopher Lyons. This time it's LWT again, and early February 1991. The joint-venture "ITV Night Time" from London hasn't been invented yet. Shortly after it started, Thames lost the franchise. Gah. We begin with yet another poxy Teledisc advert, although fortunately only the very end. "Tell It Through The Song" is the title, apparently; it has one notable feature, and that's the only known CD release of the single version of The Man With The Child In His Eyes by Kate Bush. So there's an incentive. Next is TV Times, who help out with the dating by, well, actively stating some dates. The deregulatory expansion is coming soon! We responded by dropping the TV Times altogether it in favour of the Radio Times, because we're so bloody bourgeois. One thing that confused me at the time was that because they'd set the date as March 1st, and that happened to be a Friday in 1991, both magazines had to print a week's worth of listings with empty columns from Saturday to Thursday where the other guys eventually went on the Friday. Then there's a Dundas-vintage ITV/LWT ident with no announcement (because it's late and it's LWT) which fades into what can only be described as a screensaver. The high saturation suggests that it might have started life as a colour test film. Whatever the case, it's filler and isn't pretending otherwise: almost ten minutes of surfing footage. Windsurfing, boogie boarding, your actual surfing, it's all here, in Hawaii apparently, and soundtracked by a Pages from Ceefax imitation of Giorgio Moroder. Except when it cuts to a bored Frenchman writing a letter home, which is accompanied by generic Hawaiian sounding guitar music instead. No titles or credits, or point of origin. It could be the middle of a feature-length documentary for all I know. Endless Summer, maybe (but with a distinctly eighties soundtrack). It's literally just an alternative to a blank screen, but a pleasant enough one. Immediately following that (and a repeat of the ident) is the News, which goes some way to explaining why a screensaver was necessary in the first place. LWT had clearly managed to carve a big hole of nothing around the immovable, nationally-networked scheduling monolith that is a news bulletin. That HAD to be on at that time. It WOULD be on at that time. No getting away from it. So, find an old, copyright-irrelevant test film or something and plug the gap. The only other option would be a blank screen, a holding slide reading "JUST GO TO BED", or ten minutes of PIFs, which would have been fun. Flying toasters? Anyway, the News! Introduced with that ominous three-note tune and the ITN logo looming over a colony on Mars. Hey, it's Anne Leuchars again! Still can't spell Lucas. Same haircut as in 1989, if a tad greyer, but an expression that suggests she'd really like to be given the opportunity of reading the news during the hours of daylight for a change. The news is pretty harrowing, particularly with hindsight. It's mostly about Iraq! For a change. We're about halfway through the Gulf War. Ground operations ain't started yet, but they're getting there. Saddam just launched some scuds at Israel out of pique, but fortunately they were rubbish. There's some nightmarish glimpses of Dick Cheney and Colon Powell, which given the setting makes it all seem like Jim Henson's Neocon Babies. The Red Cross, portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni as Anton Rodgers, are bloody annoyed. As for home affairs: more clamps for the homeless. Anne musters a smile and "join us at 5 if you can" before probably collapsing into a snoring heap. Then that ident plays in full AGAIN, this time to introduce the eerily robotic and detached Hollywood plug-fest CinemAttractions, "hosted" out of vision, and probably out of the country, by Charlie Tuna. There's a dumb story connected to how he ended up with that psuedonym but I don't have the room or inclination to tell it. Sorry, Charlie. Chriddof then cuts to the commercial break, which appears to have been placed at random in the middle of a clip, because who cares at 4.15 AM in the morning? The Tesco Value holding slide fades to, slightly surprisingly, some adverts. I suppose there's no reason LWT shouldn't have been able to sell this dead air space to SOMEONE, even if TSW couldn't. The someone in question: Our Price, the quaintly named record store. They're flogging a generic compilation of sad MOR love songs. Which is nice. You can also pay a premium to hear clips from it down a phone line, or just tune to Radio 2 but leave the dial sort of halfway there. Much the same effect. Finally (just the two adverts at this time of night; LWT aren't miracle workers), some conditioner. As I've mentioned before, as a bloke none of this means anything to me. Shame, really, because I have great hair. Apparently. Back to CinemAttractions; Charlie invites us to look at the US movie charts. Thanks, but I'd rather go to bed. Sorry, Charlie.