BBC 1 1985

A live picture of a spinning globe had been shown before BBC programmes since the Sixties. When colour came to BBC 1, a curved mirror was added behind the globe, and the effect this produced continued to be seen on screen for over fifteen years. But technology had moved on and time was running out for this mechanical symbol.

A solid state device had generated the symbol on BBC 2 since the end of the Seventies. Subsequently, electronic clocks on both networks had replaced the mechanical clocks. And in early 1984, work began on a project to generate a digital symbol for BBC 1.

Special thanks to BBC Research & Development and Hywel Williams for supplying the images and much of the information used on this page.

Some of the images shown on this page contain graphics that are copyright of the BBC.

Michael Grade joined the BBC as Controller of BBC 1 in September 1984. When he arrived, work was already underway to develop a new globe symbol. The initial difficulty had been to get the world to rotate one whole revolution with the limited amount of memory chips available. But this problem was soon solved.

Another project was also in development when Grade arrived, a soap opera called EastEnders. The new controller knew he had to arrest the falling ratings on his channel and decided to delay the introduction of the new soap to co-incide with a re-launch of the programme schedule. EastEnders would go out on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7pm. Terry Wogan would start the evening on the other weekdays with a chat show. The new globe was also delayed so it could form part of the new look.

Viewers would see the new globe for the first time at 7pm on Monday, February 18th, 1985 as the announcer welcomed them to Wogan.

			
The device that made the earth move came in a metal box that would
				have been mounted in a rack together with a	similar-looking box
				responsible for generating the station clock. You can see	them both
				here.

As well as the network globe for England housed at Television Centre in London, a player would have been required for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Each English region would also require its own player for the times when it opted out of the national schedule.

A switch on the box, marked CEEFAX, added the text "CEEFAX 888" ("CEEFAX 170" initially) underneath the station name on the network globe. For the other globes it added text to identify the nation or regional centre.

This is what a globe player looks like when you open it up.

On the left there are ten removable cards filled with PROM (Programmable Read-Only Memory) chips containing 20 000 pixels of map data pre-rendered as frames of animation. Each card has on its side a yellow LED that lights up when that card is in use.

To the right of these cards are five unused slots and to the right of those is a card with a red handle. This is the processor card, to the right of which are four more cards containing the two images pictured below. The player can be made to display these by changing some switch settings on the processor card.

Now we can begin to see how the globe player works. The transparent
				blue sphere representing the ocean is the background image.	The
				processor uses the map data to decide for each pixel whether to leave
				it as the sea or overlay a pixel from the golden sphere	for the land or
				simply plot a black pixel to represent the land on the other side of
				the world.

A test image is provided by the player which tests some of the video mixer's abilities, including what the ocean globe looks like when some land is overlayed onto it.

If you look closely, you will see that the golden shell is slightly larger than the blue sphere, so that the land has the subtle effect of floating over the top of the ocean as it rotates.

Take the COW for a spin (or two).

MP4
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Globe player facts

One complete revolution takes twelve seconds and each second requires 25 frames of animation, a total of 300, stored on the memory cards.
If you remove one of the cards, the globe will display just the ocean when it tries to use the data on that card.
Unlike the BBC 2 symbol from six years earlier, the new globe symbol was anti-aliased, so there were no jagged edges where the land met the sea and where the sea and the lettering met the background.
Inside the BBC, the new globe was known as COW, an acronym for computer-originated world. It was also referred to as OWL (Open World Logo) and the hardware had the code GE060565 or GE6SM/565, where GE6 was the code for a video waveform generator.
A version of the COW was also used for BBC Video and another was used in the opening titles of Alas Smith & Jones (on BBC 2). For Comic Relief, a red nose was 'attached' to the globe.

Parody of BBC 1 globe used in the opening titles of Alas Smith & Jones.

In January 2006 a COW player came up for sale on eBay. But instead of showing the BBC 1 legend, this one displayed the logo for BBC Worldwide underneath the globe.
The COW lasted just about six years before it was replaced with a new BBC 1 ident. But it did find a new home on the two variants of BBC World Service Television, broadcast to audiences outside the UK.

The first image is from the European feed where the globe was used before each programme, just as it was in the UK. The second image is from the feed seen outside of Europe, where the use of the globe image was more varied. (Links to video of these below.)

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A comprehensive technical article on the BBC 1 COW was published in Eng Inf No. 20: The Quarterly for BBC Engineering Staff, reproduced at BBeng.info, a website containing recollections of BBC Engineering from 1922 to 1997.
You can download a screensaver that re-creates the rotating world from Richard Russell's BBC Basic site.
TVARK has a page showing the globe, clock and other presentation from the BBC 1 1985 re-brand, including special versions of the globe.
Edited highlights of the first evening of the new globe can be seen on YouTube.
There's a YouTube channel dedicated to clips of the Europe-wide entertainment-led version of BBC World Service Television, which used the rotating globe as an ident.
Transdiffusion have a YouTube video showing how the globe was used on the news / factual version of BBC World Service Television that was seen outside of Europe.

BBC 1 1985A Computer Originated World

Globe player facts

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BBC 1 1985
A Computer Originated World