I imagine that’s not as uncommon as it could be. 2GB radio here in Sydney used 615/WCPM’s Magnum package for a while before Alan Jones and Ray Hadley moved over to the station - talking late 90s/early 2000s as their relaunch after those moves happened in 2002.
Along the same lines, today marks the 24th year since the 1999 earthquake in Central Taiwan.
Here’s a look at how local TV channels reported on the quake. Since the quake occured at the early hours of the day, there wasn’t instant live news coverage - an on-screen roller would be suffice.
- TTV, then still controlled by the government, displayed a roller of text on the side, denoting the earthquake.
- CTV, then controlled by KMT, put up a newsflash caption stating the quake’s epicenter, the resulted power outage and damages (around 1 minute in).
- FTV, the island’s first publicly-owned commercial station, simulcast CNN’s coverage, despite having their own cable news channel for 2 years (around a minute and half in, in terrible signal).
This is a detailed report from another government broadcaster CTS’ Evening News that night:
And this is TTV’s special report, specifically 30 hours after the fact.
Over in Hong Kong, this was how TVB News reported the earthquake that evening, utilizing footage of their sister cable channel, TVBS-N.
The UK’s Paramount Comedy 1 was rebranded as Comedy Central UK in 2009
Soon it will be seven years since TVNZ channels TV One and TV2 rebranded to TVNZ 1 and TVNZ 2 which was changed on 2 October 2016
Coverage of the 1997 Chunichi Dragons season from Nagoya’s Fuji Television affiliate Tokai TV. Had a very impressive 3D render of the Nagoya Dome and used a clean version the Fuji TV network baseball coverage theme of the time.
Probably good they didn’t use the vocal version; I have heard it before and - unsurprisingly - pretty Engrishy. Perhaps doubly unsurprisingly because a lot of baseball terms are loanworded from English, even things like fielding position names and such (even if they then use kanji abbreviations for them), so.
Was probably one of the last years they used that, Fuji went on to use a heavy guitar-based theme (Michiya Haruhata’s “Jaguar”, which has been updated over the years - he also did an anthem for J.League soccer) not long after; '98 or '99 or so.
It’s not unusual for these to be joined in progress after the first hour on over-the-air TV like that too (they came in during the bottom of the 4th inning here). Most night-time NPB games during the regular season, even now, start at 6pm (usual schedule is Tuesday-Saturday, then Sunday afternoon) - when the network news slots on weekdays generally don’t finish until 7.
Obviously pay TV has permitted more games to be shown live in its entireity, but the coverage from what I understand tends to be more focused on the teams closer to Tokyo. On the other hand, with some outlying teams often being on independent/JAITS stations, I’m not sure whether they suffer the same fate of missing the first hour as much, as they’re not bound by the network news commitment.
edit: Also worth knowing for anyone used to US baseball (I realise that’s a fairly small sliver but still), the balls and strikes are the other way around to usual - eg. they would have said “2 strikes, 3 balls” and the graphic reflects that - Korea and possibly other Asian countries like Taiwan were the same; both Japan and Korea only changed to the way “we’re used to” in the mid-2010s.
I laughed the first time I heard it. The clean version is so much better.
Here’s the vocal version for those who are curious.
omd that’s horrific very very 90s…
Here’s a 1990 news open from WAPA in Puerto Rico. The station used Gari’s Turn to News theme, which was also heard in Australia.
Some snippets of the changing identity of the defunct British satellite/cable channel Granada Plus. This channel began broadcasting in October 1996 as part of a joint venture between BSkyB and Granada. Its main purpose was airing old shows from Granada and LWT.
Over the years, they added programs from Yorkshire (and from other ITV companies like ATV and Thames), along with some imported classics from the US, such as Kojak and Hawaii Five-O. Plus (as it was known in its final years) was shut down in November 2004.
The station’s late 1980s look was designed by John Christopher Burns and features his distinctive style:
Did you know the VH2 cube idents have won Promax UK 2004?
I guess it could be worse broken-English than that, and still manages to fit the iconic Fuji sports theme.
For those playing at home, “JOCX” (as sung in the second line, originally “-TV”, now “-DTV”) being Fuji TV’s call letters… most TV affiliate stations in Japan carry a three-letter English abbreviation as their name but many of the Tokyo stations don’t, so the tendency is to call some by their call letters or just the bit after the “JO” prefix (eg. CX for Fuji, EX for TV Asahi, and of course the independent Tokyo MX speaks for itself).