Before ITV branding was introduced in 2020, UTV/Ulster Television used a number of different logos, or
idents on-screen over the years. •
1959 – The station's first on-screen logo was an
oscilloscope pattern made up of seven dots joined by six lines. The logo animated to a jingle based on the local folk tune
The Mountains of Mourne. According to UTV's website, the original logo was designed as part of a competition, and the winner among over 450 entrants was Mr Roy Irwin of Ballycarry. •
1970 – With the imminent launch of UHF colour broadcasts, Ulster Television redesigned its first logo – the oscilloscope pattern was retained; but the dots were removed, and the lines were encased in a television-screen shape. Monochrome and colour versions of this ident were produced, the colour using a yellow logo and text on a blue background, which were adopted as the station's colour scheme. UTV's ident at this time did not animate and was not accompanied by a jingle. The logo type introduced on this ident was retained until 1993. •
1980 – To celebrate their 21st anniversary, UTV commissioned a new ident featuring a model of the station logo embedded on four faces of a cube, coated in silver with a pole skewering the top and bottom of the cube. This model was then filmed on video with a black cloth background as it revolved on a turntable. When it appeared on screen, it was accompanied by a synthesised jingle, and the words "Ulster Television" wiped on screen in yellow text. This ident made its on-screen debut on Halloween Day 1980, and it was used until New Year's Eve 1988. •
1987 – On 7 September 1987, to coincide with the launch of the station's new evening magazine programme,
Six Tonight, a new ident was used to introduce the programme, featuring a computer-animated silver station logo on a blue/green backdrop. After five seconds, the logo faded into the background as the titles of
Six Tonight began. This ident, UTV's first attempt at a CGI ident, was later adapted as a temporary station ident in the last few months of 1988, with a video freeze used as the logo sank into the background. •
1989 – On New Year's Day 1989 a revised
computer animation was introduced and the last to feature the oscilloscope logo and the "Ulster Television" name. The ident began with a panning shot over a huge plate with texture to make it look like frost or ice (possibly a white and gray cloudy texture), against a light blue background. Then, an oscilloscope rises out from the plate, and the lines of the oscilloscope pattern are formed with a wipe. In this ident, the lines of the oscilloscope are yellow, with the rest of the logo (the television screen shape) in blue. When the lines are formed, the logo turns and reveals on screen, as a grey banner flies in underneath bearing the words "Ulster Television" and settles underneath the station logo, waving like a flag. This ident was accompanied by a new jingle, and was used until 4 June 1993. •
1993 – At 6pm on 4 June 1993, UTV officially unveiled a new logo. This consisted of an italicised
Times Roman capital U forming on screen from different component parts, settling on a blue and yellow plate with "TV" written in italicised red Agency FB Font text. A new jingle was also introduced with a distinct Celtic sound. Since the start of 1993, continuity announcements and trailers referred increasingly to "UTV", and the station's news service was rebranded as
UTV Live. With the new logo, the use of "Ulster Television" to identify the station was consigned to history. It also dropped ITV network promotions and introduced locally produced trails. •
1996 – UTV introduced a new series of idents on 11 November 1996, which showcased scenic locations in Northern Ireland. These include the
Giant's Causeway, a waterfall at Glenarriff, and
Portaferry harbour. These are supplemented on 12 January 1998 with a set of idents featuring people playing the UTV jingle on various musical instruments. Some of the idents featured UTV personalities. It also dropped live daytime continuity. •
2000 – On 1 July 2000, the
day when programme presentation and commercials shown on the four main UK television channels switched from the
4:3 aspect ratio to
14:9 on analogue broadcasts and
16:9 on digital broadcasts, UTV refused to adopt the 1999
ITV Hearts look and introduced a new set of idents inspired by the 1989 ITV generic ident featuring a stripe on a black background using footage from the 1996 "landscape" idents, the break filler films used on its short-lived sister channel
TV You, and a UTV corporate advertisement where a shoal of fish grouped together to form the 1993 logo. This collection of idents were the first to be created and transmitted in 16:9 aspect ratio, on
digital terrestrial and
digital cable providers. This was the last set of idents which used the 1993 logo, and they were phased out shortly before Christmas 2000, when a new logo was introduced. •
2001 – The 1993 logo was later replaced with a similar flatter and wider logo. The "U" is rendered in yellow on a blue oblong, with the "TV" in red on a yellow oblong contained inside the blue oblong. Its first use was in UTV's 2000 Christmas ident, replacing the previous set. On 6 January 2001, a new series of idents shot at various locations across Northern Ireland, including the
Silent Valley Reservoir in County Down, Great Victoria Street in Belfast and the
Hands Across the Divide sculpture at the
Craigavon Bridge, Derry. This was complemented by further idents in 2002 featuring people walking towards the camera and touching the screen with their fingers to make the UTV logo appear. •
2002 – On 28 October 2002, most of the regional ITV companies adopted a common look with the ITV1 brand replacing the various station logos. This was marked with a series of idents showing actors, presenters and newsreaders associated with ITV appearing in idents. At the same time, UTV decided to adopt these idents, but replaced the ITV logo with their own station logo. The soundtrack used on these idents was identical to those heard on the ITV network versions. This is the nearest that UTV had come to using identical idents to the rest of the ITV network. Around Christmas 2002, UTV broadcast a similar collection of idents showcasing their own presenting talent, shown in addition to the national idents. By early 2003, the network and local celebrity idents were phased out, and a generic ident showing the UTV logo on an animated blue background was used in all junctions. •
2003 – UTV replaces its network-inspired graphics on 20 November 2003 with a series landscape films of Northern Ireland in their idents, in the form of a
panorama shot as the camera revolved around a location. Among the scenes used in this series of UTV idents included the
Mourne Mountains,
Enniskillen and
Lurgan Park. These idents primarily used one of the ident jingles until 3 November 2005, when UTV reprised its 1993–2002 station jingle. •
2006 – To coincide with the introduction of a new identity across ITV plc stations on Monday 16 January 2006, UTV replaced its 2003 idents with a brand new set. The new idents featured newly recorded films shot across Northern Ireland, again in the form of panoramas. with the background of each ident changing from black to white in December 2008. Special variations of the UTV idents were used to promote the 2006 North West 200 event, 2006 Special Olympics, and the
UTV Rewind series. •
2016 – On 17 October 2016, a brand new look was unveiled, aligning the UTV brand more closely with that of the
ITV channel. The station idents, based on those used by ITV since a major rebrand in January 2013, included the UTV logo changing colour as it blended in on a live-action scene - a process known as "colour picking". •
2020 – Since 2 April 2020, UTV has taken full ITV branding and presentation from London including network announcements, idents, promos and end credit sequences. This was initially announced as a temporary measure due to the impact of the
COVID-19 pandemic on staff at the Belfast studios. Local continuity was officially abandoned in November 2020 with the departures of the announcing team.
Local continuity Until April 2020, UTV was one of two stations in the ITV network – and the only one owned by ITV plc – to have its own continuity announcers. UTV was also the last company in the network to retain in-vision continuity links, where the duty announcer appeared on-camera to introduce the evening's programmes. In later years, local continuity was generally restricted to evenings with in-vision links presented at weekends by senior announcer
Julian Simmons. In 2009, the practice was restored to weekday evenings and presented by the entire announcing team. Following the sale of UTV, ITV plc transferred most of the station's presentation operations from the Havelock House studios in Belfast to
Red Bee Media in
Chiswick, which provides playout services for most of ITV's channels. The last live in-vision announcement was made by Simmons at 11.15 pm on Sunday 16 October 2016, marking the end of 57 years of local transmission. Two of UTV's longest-serving announcers, Julian Simmons and
Gillian Porter, were retained to pre-record out-of-vision continuity – with
Aidan Browne providing relief cover – until 2 April 2020, when the channel began taking ITV-branded network presentation as a result of the
COVID-19 pandemic. In November 2020, it was reported the announcing team had left UTV following a decision to switch permanently to network continuity.
Station theme tunes In common with the rest of the ITV Network, the station aired specially composed signature tunes as part of its daily start-up routine. From launch until 1971, the opening theme was
Seamus by the American musician, composer and bandleader Van Phillips, who had earlier written the theme tune of the popular 1950s BBC radio science fiction drama
Journey into Space. UTV's best-known theme was
The Antrim Road, a classical symphony composed by Wayne Hill and Earl Ward, which was used between 1971 and 1983. It originally featured on
The British Isles, an LP of orchestral arrangements of traditional and characteristic national tunes of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The album was released on the De Wolf label in 1971. ==HD and timeshift ==