Coming to a television screen near you this Saturday…

The BBC has spent £1.2m replacing the dancing wheelchairs that appear between  programmes. The new ‘idents’ – as they’re  known in the trade – are based on circles. Some will say they’re a load of balls.

Cue the inevitable synthetic outrage about wasting licence-payers’ money. My grouse is more serious: the film idents are deadly dull. Anything repeated day in, day out turns people off. The BBC dancers lost any impact after a few months. I groan when they appear.

My other complaint is about the usual pretentious attempts to claim the idents carry
symbolic meaning. (They’re meant to  represent the BBC’s ability to bring people together.) Forget it. They’re just a way of reminding us which channel we’re  watching.  The old musical idents on Channel 4 – bom bom BOM bom! – did a better job on the cheap.

And finally… Here’s the long-lived Thames Television ident. According to Wikipedia the music was composed by the man responsible for the theme to Roobarb & Custard.