CiTV: Encyclopedia II - CiTV - The Past

CiTV - The Past

Produced by Central Independent Television, Children's ITV first went on air in January 1983, and consisted of programmes with recorded links in between, initially featuring a different presenter each month. Recorded links continued until 1987, when it started to be broadcast live, echoing Children's BBC which had started two years earlier.

In 1989, a company called Stonewall Productions won the contract to produce Children's ITV, and it did so until April 1991, when Central won it back.

In February 1993, in-vision presentation was dropped, with Steven Ryde providing the voiceovers for out-of-vision links featuring a wide variety of animated characters. A few months later the Children's ITV name was changed to the more youth-friendly Citv, having been used in some form or another since the previous year (the arrangement of upper- and lower-case letters matches that of the logo used at the time). However, the "Children's" wasn't removed from the logo until September 1996, the same month a Digital On-screen Graphic (DOG) was introduced.

This continued until May 1998, when a new in-vision service was introduced, fronted by presenters Stephen Mulhern and Danielle Nicholls. A new logo was introduced, and henceforth the service has been referred to as CiTV. The studio space available was initially very small, but in September 1999, CiTV started sharing studio space with Central News, allowing room for a large stylised set created by a company called Dorans Propmakers.

The service remained fundamentally the same, with occasional changes to the set and presenter lineup, until September 2004, when an out-of-vision service was re-introduced, most likely due to budget cuts laid down by ITV management.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Past", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki