IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN [481]

Instead of always thinking about the next article, I have been persuaded to look back on my writing in the last year. Without going into all fifty-one of them, I have compiled lists of my ten most-read articles published in 2024 – fortunately, I am happy with the quality of all of them – followed by five that I think should get an extra mention.

I don’t see any deliberate connections between approach or subject matter between them, which is a good thing, as I don’t want to be tied down to a predictable formula. However, I do see that they are the products of reactions, either to personal experience or to the news. There is scope for more approaching subjects in a more creative fashion, and to go into greater depth on some subjects, so do expect some experimentation in 2025 – judging from what topped the most-read list below, I had better start exploring approaches to cybernetics, and the cyber-society in which we find ourselves.

I can see the articles listed below cover a lot of ground, which I hope is an indication of confidence. My five hundredth article will appear here during 2025, most definitely the result of perseverance from week to week. Oddly enough, it is only during this year that a couple of ground rules have made themselves known to me: aim to pass five hundred words, but hope to reach a thousand; and attempt to sum up the point you want to make in the first sentence, like how the below piece about Jaguar began: “Creativity doesn’t have to make sense to you personally, even in advertising.” I may have got that last idea from reading something about Stephen King.

Eight out of the ten most-read articles were been published in the last three months, which I have put down to my having ditched Twitter in favour of Bluesky – my handle is @leighspence.bluesky.social – which thankfully feels like the egalitarian Twitter of old. Having locked my “X” account in response to its owner’s twisting the site’s experience out of all recognition, the switch to Bluesky pretty much confirms that links to external sites from “X” were being throttled – once my local bus company stops using “X” for service updates I am deleting the app altogether. I hope to use social media more in 2025 to let people know what they can find here, now that the dust from the social media square-dance-stampede is settling.

And so, here is the list of my most-read articles published during 2024:

1. LIKE A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (published 28/01/2024): nailing down a working definition of “cybernetics”, for when I eventually plan to write about cybernetics. With control and communication being key factors across the definitions I found of the word, I can only guess this is a subject that people found important, and not just entertaining to read about.

2. AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT (24/03/2024): rediscovering “Seinfeld”, the sitcom that initially made no impact in the UK, having been relegated to midnight screening on BBC Two when Parliament was not in recess, and how it was my little secret before DVDs and streaming made it more accessible. Jerry Seinfeld made some controversial statements when promoting his new film “Unfrosted”, so I guess that added to the interest. 

3. YOU SAW THE WHOLE OF THE MOON (13/10/2024): why did ITV station Meridian Broadcasting use a half-sun, half-moon face to present television in the south of England? See under “things that lived rent-free in my head for years”.

4. BUT STILL THEY COME! (03/11/2024): being bombarded by “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds” in a busy shop. I don’t think I made clear that I loved listening to the album in full, but that visceral experience in HMV in Oxford Street led me to leave the store empty-handed, hardly the outcome the staff wanted.

5. TOO BUSY DODGING BETWEEN THE FLAK (10/11/2024): Donald Trump is re-elected, but I already talked about him the last time around – unlike him, I didn’t feel like re-litigating the past so, like this list, I linked to what I’ve mentioned before.

6. WE FADE TO GREY (27/10/2024): Fiat won’t sell you a grey car, as it’s not “La Dolce Vita”. This was a case of “I beg your pardon?” upon finding out both that the favourite new car colour in the UK is grey, and that Fiat saw fit to respond.

7. LIKE SUGAR AND SPICE (20/10/2024): Coca-Cola Spiced, a short-lived drink where “spiced” meant “with raspberry”. I had bought the drink, was underwhelmed about it, and with its withdrawal being announced not long afterwards, I could understand why...

8. GONE FISHIN’  (17/11/2024): the nostalgic, Proustian delights of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish – this one literally wrote itself, including the snap back to reality about burgers being a “sometimes” food.

9. BOYS ALWAYS WORK IT OUT (06/10/2024): constructing an article using Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” card set. This one became as much of an introspective work as this article was, and has many lessons for 2025, including: “Don’t give yourself enough time to decipher or question your methods. Ritual leads the way. Deadline is style. You are in there somewhere.”

10. I’LL CALL YOU JAGUAR IF I MAY BE SO BOLD (24/11/2024): the reinvention of Jaguar, after people stopped noticing their cars. I felt indignant about the lazy use of “woke” being used to describe a creative endeavour, regardless of it being one from a multi-billion pound company, and that made this article very easy to write.

...and here is my personal list of honourable mentions:

ON WITH THE SHOW, THIS IS IT (07/04/2024) and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG (14/04/2024): a work performance review leads into a two-part exploration of Bugs Bunny, the witty and fearless cartoon character and queer role model.

SAY HELLO, WAVE GOODBYE (31/03/2024): the death in March 2024 of Wave 105, a very popular radio station that served its local area until its owners realised the license could be fulfilled with less effort, reducing it to local news and ads on a national network. (Since then, two other stations in the same area, Nation Radio and BBC Radio Solent, took on nearly all of Wave 105’s on-air staff, with Nation Radio becoming a more local station in the process – where there’s a will...)

IF YOU’RE ALRIGHT, YOU CAN’T GO WRONG (18/02/2024): celebrating the career of Steve Wright, the immensely popular radio presenter, and discovering how he built the signature sound of his shows. “His public modesty about his own career is admirable, and while he never really got personal on air, you were always left with the impression that he was a thoroughly sincere and hard-working man.”

I'VE SEEN THAT MOVIE TOO (28/04/2024): although prompted by Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts comedy biopic “Unfrosted”, the opening sentence, for a look at how Hollywood’s demise has been predicted many time, is definitely that of a film scholar: “To make your debut as a feature film director by declaring the death of the film industry is a trick that Jean-Luc Godard sadly missed.”

DID I TELL YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE (15/09/2024): defining “Pages from Ceefax” as a genre of music, taking in the nostalgia of watching, and listening, to teletext pages filling the gaps between TV programmes.

YOU SAW THE WHOLE OF THE MOON [470]

[Update: A big thank you to the digital artist Dave Jeffery [https://www.kecskebak.hu/], whose work in creating and recreating channel idents has been used on screen by the BBC and Big Centre TV, for contacting me via Mastodon to confirm that Meridian’s logo was designed by Ian Carley, the company’s head of design. The original article is below.]

The half-sun, half-moon face used as a logo by Meridian Broadcasting has remained lodged in my mind long after it disappeared from TV screens, but I have never considered why it was used to represent independent television in the south and south-east of England – my hunch is that it doesn’t matter at all.

Back when ITV was the name of a network of regional TV channels, mostly named for the area on which they were broadcast – Thames, Tyne Tees, Anglia, Scottish, London Weekend Television and so on – Meridian replaced TVS (Television South), providing programmes in its area of the UK from 1993. It is still broadcasting, but in the procession of takeovers and mergers of ITV companies that began when Meridian bought Anglia in 1994, Meridian’s distinctive logo and name were usurped by a national “ITV” identity from 2002, the name living on as “ITV News Meridian”, the name of their regional bulletins.

This does not explain the choosing of its symbol, from a designer whose name I could not find, here picked out in high-contrast red, yellow and purple, initially in idents on a halved yellow and blue background. The sun-moon face is centuries old, borne of opposing forces, of duality, and of accepting this as a nature of being, from good and bad, to life and death, and femininity and masculinity. It was seen as decoration on old naval navigational tools, like compasses and sextants, fitting in with the brief of serving an area of the UK steeped in maritime and naval tradition like Portsmouth, Southampton, Cowes and Chatham, but means precisely nothing if you are also broadcasting inland to the likes of Salisbury, Reading and Oxford.

The name “Meridian” is more confusing than expected: it comes from the Latin “meridionalis”, meaning “of the south”, but it makes me think of London, and the Greenwich Meridian - this use came from the Latin “meridies”, for “midday”. When the consortium that owned Meridian bid, in 1991, to represent the ITV network in the south and south-east of England, they also bid for the London area, most likely using the same name and logo. Perhaps the intention was, just “Granada” came to symbolise Manchester and the north-west of England as much as that region of Spain, Meridian will do the same for the south, once it appears often enough. This expectation did not happen so much for Carlton, like Granada a pre-existing company with a pre-existing name, which eventually won the London licence.

The website TVArk has a quote from a J Dallas, creative director at Meridian, talking in 1999 about the replacement of their original bombastic and orchestral idents with something a lot calmer and more purple: “The idea was they thought the Company had become established and the computer graphics for the original ident looked old fashioned. The problem with the logo is it looks stuck on to something whatever you do with it.” Meanwhile, the wonderful book “Branding for Television With Knobs On” by Martin Lambie-Nairn, designer of the Channel 4 logo, noted that Meridian executives took offense at being told their production and marketing wasn’t connected by a unifying strategy and brief, its “marketing tree” being disparate twigs growing from the ground, unable to take advantage of the fact the TV channel itself, branding and all, is as much a product as the programmes by themselves.

The Meridian logo appeared everywhere: before every programme, at the end of programmes made or commissioned by them, in flashes before each advertisement break began, and in a bizarre tie-in with Southern Ford Dealers, where you could buy the Ford Fiesta Meridian special edition car – I really saw a TV broadcaster’s logo plastered on cars that private citizens chose to buy with their own money.

Meridian’s legacy was in children’s programmes like “Wizadora”, “ZZZap!” and “It’s a Mystery”, alongside dramas “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries” and “Hornblower”, and the documentary series “Monkey Business”. However, its logo was used so prominently between 1993 and 2002 that its legacy is what remains for me - it is visually striking, but it only represents itself, not what Meridian was, or continues to be.