Britain Makes It Plain: Channel Four junction into Channel Four News , 1986

Back to those Avengers repeats from the mid-eighties provided by Stuart Kenny. I have a bunch of breaks and fragments in this collection, but the vast majority consist of the same four or five adverts over and over, because it's early Channel Four and buying in bulk was a decent strategy for over-stretched ITV franchisees - or at least a better one than falling back on PIFs, or "follows shortly" slides in a worst-case scenario. The viewer, meanwhile, could be forgiven for feeling downright brainwashed as the same adverts ran, usually in similar order, over and over again. There is some unique material in this one, though, so I've uploaded it like a maniac along with some surrounding continuity. The Avengers ends with production slides for the ITV franchise ABC and also the American ABC, by pure coincidence, and is followed by a slightly unsettling freeze-frame of the start of the iconic Hill Street Blues titles. When the show started a year before Channel Four did, it wasn't networked in the UK. A handful of ITV franchises, notably Central, picked it up as 11pm schedule filler, but it was Channel Four that first showed it nationally. Fortunately they passed on Cop Rock; that was burnt off by an appalled BBC instead. After the break: Channel Four News, who've sent Trevor MacDonald and Peter Sharpe to South Africa, presumably via different airlines. The next bit is missing, but we leap in most of the way through that poxy Bristol and West Hitch-Hikers' Guide thing with the creeping arrows and neon lettering and such. And then it's Lynx again! The "Spice" one, all green tint and Pink Floyd impressions and big watery eyes. Then: finally, new material! What looks like a novelty citrus-themed alarm clock turns out to make much less sense: it's a singing, ringing tin of marmalade, apart from the singing. A voiceover then actively scolds us for being unaware of how great Chivers Breakfast Marmalade is. Sorry. Lucky I didn't ask what would happen if I had some for lunch instead. Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ. Here's Birds Dream Topping anyway. Such a tasty choice that the hundreds and thousands themselves dance for joy to be immersed in it. Or perhaps it's poison to them and they're writhing in agony. Whatever. Have a kiddywink-voiced slogan (although whether it is a child or Susan Sheridan pretending to be one I'm not sure and refuse to care). Just add milk. Finally, because they appear to have paid for the ending slot on multiple commercial breaks, it's that baffling McEwan's thing again. It's a start, but they didn't really see massive success until they dialled the "baffling" aspect up to eleven. Good evening if you've just joined us, here's the modernist Channel Four clock and Ali Ballantyne introducing the news at precisely 7:00 to the second. This is the early Channel Four News, so the graphics are very much in - once again - the Hitch-Hikers' mould, all wires and neon and a logo that I always found kind of messy and thrown-together, but that's nascent technology for you. At least the Alan Hawkshaw cowboy theme music "Best Endeavours" is present and correct (the first couple of months used something else). S.I.S.S.O.N.S. is your host, and as threatened South Africa is the main story. Amidst wide civil unrest, and states of emergency like DFS sales (in that there was almost no space in between them), Thatcher and her Government still refuse to impose sanctions on PW Botha's Apartheid-happy regime, even though everyone else was, even America. Geoffrey Howe did say a few things about freeing Nelson Mandéla and such, but that was as far as it ever went.