Throughout the years, Children's BBC, and later CBBC and CBeebies, have used a number of different identities. The branding of the stranded service is distinctive both in the past and at present.
Pre Children's BBC
Prior to the launch of Children's BBC on 9 September 1985, BBC1 used some specialist branding for its children's strand. The origins of CBBC can be found in the "Children's Hour" of the original BBC Television Service, but prior to 1984, children's programmes received no special idents and continuity was done out of vision by the duty continuity announcer. However, between programmes, some special branding was put in use to reflect better the audience they were serving.
In the 1970s, the programme caption was changed to a blue and yellow variation featuring the faces of a boy and girl, with references to other programmes: Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout, Scooby-Doo, and title cards and logos from Play School and Blue Peter. The slide was in fact coloured by the NODD system used to produce the globe at the time. The slide was later changed in 1981 to a group of children staring at the caption in excitement, following the change of globe. Promotions now featured slides of balloons, with the programme name in the centre, and occasionally accompanied by the official static captions.
Just prior to the launch of Children's BBC, a BBC Micro B 3D Collage was introduced to generate computer generated stings for the children's strand. Such animations were used to introduce programmes, such as a spider spinning down onto a detonator triggering the words Hello from BBC1, and to link into promotions for further programmes, such as a group of sky divers falling from a plane to spell out a 'Later' caption. However, despite the graphics, programmes were still directly introduced by the BBC1 globe symbol, albeit occasionally accompanied by a choice of two different 14-note synthesized tunes.
Children's BBC
Original Logo (1985 - 1991) The first ident for Children's BBC once again made use of the BBC Micro B computer. The design featured the word 'Children's' on top of a large sprawled 'BBC' made up of the three colours red, green, and blue. In the ident, each letter of the BBC animated into the four note electronic soundtrack, with the Children's scrolling across afterwards. It originally had a blue background, but this was changed to black after a few months. The letters were also all turned yellow in autumn 1986, and were set against a white background whenever programmes were broadcast on BBC2.
From the launch of the branding, live in-vision continuity was generally broadcast by a dedicated team of presenters from a small self-op Presentation studio within the BBC1 network control area at Television Centre. The presenter would talk, interact with other characters, and view children’s pictures and letters, many of which would end up on the dressed back wall of the booth. They would also operate sound and vision mixers to partially direct their own links, although overall responsibility for transmission belonged to duty transmission staff in the adjacent network control room (NC1).
For times when Children's BBC aired on BBC2, the presenter would appear in-vision from the network's self-op continuity studio, although this was not usually dressed with set branding and remained plain. A running joke would develop where the duty presenter (i.e. Phillip Schofield) would present their links in a dinner jacket because BBC2 was considered more highbrow. Promotions were of no particular style, with the promotion usually voiced by the duty presenter and featuring only the programme name and title at the bottom of the screen.
In 1987, the BBC Micro ident was replaced by one created using Cel animation. In this ident, each of the letters of the word 'Children's' was allocated an image beginning with that letter. These images - a car, a horse, an ice cream, a lighthouse, a duck, a rocket, an elephant, a number nine, and a ship - would all be drawn on screen by yellow wispy lines, which after drawing all the animals would animate out to draw the 'BBC' caption. This ident was played out from tape, as opposed to the live BBC Micro ident. These pictures also appeared on other Children's BBC items, such as stationery: letters sent from the Children's BBC office to children would have these images superimposed upon the background of the document.