Brand Watch

Today BBC News updated their title graphics and music. It's all very similar to what they had before, and I'm sure that the only people to notice or care will be title branding geeks like me.

I like it. The new title sequence, across all the news bulletins, does seem to start with a rather disturbing nuclear accident in Turkey, but it does keep the theme of the last few years. So they keep their wooshing stream of "BBC NEWS" - an image with a sort of continuity going back to the rather more sedate graphic revolving around the top of the Alexandra Palace transmitter in the 1950s.

Finally, they have seen sense and dropped the ridiculous two-word headline from the on-the-hour title sequence for News 24. It was tortuous seeng them try and reduce the headline to ten or 12 characters - invariably IRAQ BOMBS. Worse even than the old extremes of CEEFAX editors needing to fill the entire headline-row in teletext news stories.

News 24 have also decided, at long last, that they are actually offering a widescreen service. They have positioned their on-screen clock in a discrete position tucked right into the bottom-left corner. Before now they insisted in having it in the form of a large box set annoyingly far over from the bottom left corner. There, it always looked incredibly odd unless you happened to be watching a feed cropped to fit a 4:3 near-square style television where it actually would be in the corner. As it was it looked like someone had stuck a red post-it to the screen. That's all well and good until you realise that News 24 was a digital-only channel offered only in widescreen format. So why bother?