Branding CarltonInterview with Lambie-Nairn Creative Director Brian Eley

Lambie-Nairn’s work in ITV

Television for London (1993)

Focus on the Programmes (1996)

The Star of ITV (1999)

“Spread Like a Virus”

Brand Longevity

Producing the idents

Applying the brand

Inflated Costs

Sound Design

Michael Green

Attitudes towards design in television

Lambie-Nairn and dotcom companies

Creating O2

CBBC & Cbeebies

Changing Media landscape

© CARLTON / LNN 1993

Brian Eley was the Creative Director of Lambie-Nairn from 1994 to 2003.

The interview was recorded on the 17th March 2017 at The Southbank Theatre Cafe and lasted approximately an hour and a half.

Ⓒ Carlton Media 2018. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner.

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L a m b i e - N a i r n ’s w o r k i n I T V

Originally there was the Thames Television franchise in the London area and at the

weekends it was London Weekend Television. They had the licence to be the region’s

broadcasters within ITV, which was a kind of federation of regional companies. Martin

had designed the identities for some of those regions. He had worked for, for instance

for Anglia TV. The ‘triangles’ - which came out of a heraldic design because their

original identity was a model knight on a horse - a hunting trophy. The story is that

the chairman of the company had bought this thing because he liked it and someone,

probably his wife had said ‘that would look good at the beginning of your programmes’

and he said ‘yes jolly good’.

So they had the knight which looks like something from the 1940’s and Martin, in

a period when in the 80s when he was very cleverly bringing some new thinking

into television, said why don’t we reduce that. “You’re very wedded to the knight we

understand that. Why not look at the essence of it. Let’s look at the fact that it’s a

heraldic figure, holding a banner with some sort of heraldic device of some sort. Let’s

look at that and concentrate on that – let’s get rid of the horse, let’s get rid of the man

in armour, let’s just concentrate on heraldic significance of it.” And so he managed,

through great powers of persuasion to distil it all down to this simple heraldic device

which was in fact a modern looking thing constructed of triangles. I don’t know why

triangles maybe just some subconscious link between angles and Anglia.

Te l e v i s i o n f o r L o n d o n ( 1 9 9 3 )

It was London Weekend and it was Thames. In the case of Thames, very literally the

Thames and the skyline of London. I think it was Tower Bridge and St Pauls. This

was at a period when the cliché that every journalist would use about television,

commercial television, ITV television, was that it was ‘a licence to print money’. If you

had one of those franchises, you could just sit back and let the advertising revenue

roll in. You didn’t have to do anything and you barely had to make programmes, you

just had to show the regulator that you were kind of looking after the

local interests. In the case of London, it is a big metropolitan area. You

couldn’t look at it in the same way as the west of England or Anglia. It

was supposedly more parochial. This was a big city and the Thames

area was more about being international. International programming

and prestige drama.

One of the things that researchers always came up against when they

researched perceptions of the ITV networks was that whenever they

did anything really good or spent a lot of money to do something lavish

people loved it, watched it and then two weeks later they would say

‘we watched that wonderful costume drama on BBC’. They would think

that if it was costume drama, if it was like The Jewel in the Crown or

an Evelyn Waugh adaptation it was always mistaken somehow because

of its production values, because BBC meant quality in those days.

That was the perception. So these companies were always trying to say

‘No, no look we’re about quality. We do make tonnes of money we’re

very grateful for it but we’re not just about that’. It was very hard for

them to deny the fact that they were just making a lot of money. This

was in the days when the most effective way of reaching the maximum

amount of people was through television advertising. You could charge

extraordinary sums for airtime. On ITV, the most expensive airtime

would be the break in the middle of News at Ten. Because then you’ve

got people waiting to see the rest of the news, they’ve all tuned in for

the news, and they have to sit through the ad break.

Thames got complacent. For one reason or another – some of it may

have been political, they became very vulnerable. A businessman named

Michael Green tried to buy into Thames, couldn’t get what he wanted,

which was a controlling stake and so outbid them at the next round

of auctions. He outbid them by millions, and so inherited the Thames

franchise. Which couldn’t therefore be called Thames anymore. They

had a studio down at Teddington, which was central to production but

it wasn’t the broadcaster. He left that alone, decided he was going to

buy in all programming, not make anything because that is expensive-

you need studios, you’d need to buy the studios etcetera. He set about

Branding Carlton TelevisionINTERVIEW WITH BRIAN ELEY

4

rebranding the channel as Carlton. At that point he went to Martin, who was the man

to go to at that point to talk about branding a TV channel. And the first thing Martin

had to do was to sit Michael Green down and say look, your name means nothing.

What is a Carlton? Who is Carlton? Carlton was a minor character from a popular

sitcom… there was a butler called Carlton. Carlton was involved in a chain of hotels, it

was a car. There were various things which were Carlton. Carlton was just one of those

names which was just bought off a shelf at Companies House and it was meaningless

- there was no Carlton. So, Martin’s first job really was to give it some character. Also,

to point out that it was now taking control of London, and it would be Television for

London. He did this thing with the logo which was extraordinary really, and I have

never really seen a proper rationale for it, but it was intuitive. He manipulated the

typography, so he had a little character within larger characters and it made you look

twice at the name, so already you were questioning - is this meaningless Carlton,

or is this Carlton with some meaning? What is it about? It was all about making it

distinctive, having a personality - you couldn’t tell what it was - it was a bit cryptic.

Television for London became about putting a face, a Londoners face to the name.

And so there were these series of idents which featured these distinctive coloured

backgrounds, and they had all kinds of people. There would be a club bouncer, there

would be a boy scout, a showgirl from a Soho club, there would be a rugby player,

there’d be a Coldstream guard, there’d be a fireman, and they were all real people,

recruited basically off the street by a casting director who was given their name

and their neighbourhood in London - from Hackney, from Tottenham, from Streatham

or wherever. These were typically Martin Lambie-Nairn; they were unlike typical

television idents. They were not the spinning logos, they were not computer graphics,

they were live action, and they were based on people – the implication being this was

their channel. A channel for them. And the slogan was Television for London.

The first ones spoke which was also a bit weird. They were addressing you directly.

They cut back on that because it, in a way it sort of limited you – you couldn’t have

people talking when other messages were coming up. These were in the foreground as

it were, and so you’re able to do other things with the background, casting shadows.

You’ve got Coronation Street with a domestic, homely touch. These might have been

done by Lambie-Nairn or by the in-house team, but they were struggling to use the

things they had been given to say more. It was difficult to stretch it and see how it

could last very long.

A selection of Carlton idents from 1993

The redesigned idents in 1994

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Project DetailsCreative Director - Martin Lambie-NairnDesigner / Director - Daniel BarberTransmission Dates - 01/01/93 to 01/09/95Designed and Produced at Lambie-Nairn

So, that was in many ways a great launch campaign, but it was difficult to sustain

over time because what you do when you create the idents, is that you’re not only

creating a little five to ten second moment on the screen, you’re also creating a kit of

parts - a logo, colour pallet, graphic devices, sound. Which can be used to make for

instance, promos for particular programmes, strands of programmes, series and so

forth. There was very little in here besides a logo and colour, or a logo and colours,

that anyone could work with.

F o c u s o n t h e P r o g r a m m e s ( 1 9 9 6 )

The next iteration of this identity where it became not about the people, but it came

about the programmes. The logic was that you make the programmes the star. People

were tuning in to see Coronation Street they want something that is about Coronation

Street. For Juliet Bravo they took the logo, put that front and centre, and then played

games with it. They put a flashing blue light on the side or on top of the logo, and it

became a police car, with the right sound effects you’d get something that is redolent

of the police. So you play around with the elements you’ve got, you create something

more useful in a way, because you’ve got away from people, and you’ve got more

action going on. It was a feeling from the Carlton board that they wanted it to be

a little brasher and more pacey. It was one of those instances where people were

rebelling against the minimal style that Martin had given them. They wanted it to be

more showy. ITV has always been more about showiness, it has always been strong

on light entertainment, sport, popular programing. It’s not had the duty of the BBC to

inform as well as entertain. It’s sort of been able to be racier.

T h e S t a r o f I T V ( 1 9 9 9 )

Michael Green and others were going around buying up TV franchises, saying that it

doesn’t make any sense within a small geographical area like the British Isles with all

of these different companies with all these different identities and playing on the idea

of somehow people in the Midlands have got a really strong sense Midlands identity,

and want to be different from people in the East Midlands and in the West Country

and in the South and in London and in the North and so on. They thought why don’t

we just play to our strengths and be the ITV network. There had always been a fall

back of the ITV network. They had a name a logotype, but it was almost like a holding

company - it didn’t have a lot of onscreen presence. Wherever you were you saw your

local franchise. In the case of London, it was Carlton. There was an identity designed

7 8

Project DetailsCreative Director - Martin Lambie-NairnDesigner / Director - Charlotte CastleTransmission Dates - 25/11/96 to 06/09/99Designed and Produced at Lambie-Nairn

Various bits of presentation from the ITV hearts identity that Carlton refused. These generic versions date from 2001. Carlton did not like having this brand imposed from above.

Carlton’s 1996 ident set

ITV’s 1998 rebrand

for ITV by a company called English & Pockett. I think the lead creative was Darrell

Pockett, who I knew, and he and his team were charged with making idents for ITV,

and what they were fundamentally doing was trying to iron out the inconsistencies

with the on screen naming and badging of the channels. But at Carlton, the board,

led by Michael Green didn’t like them. There was a resistance from having something

imposed from above. They wanted to be their own show. They wanted to have

something that had more meaning for them. So we were asked to devise a way of

referring to ITV and having the ITV name there, but being proudly Carlton. Besides

being an on screen identity for the channel, it was also about branding all of Carlton’s

media business. It was Carlton Media Group that we were really working for. The TV

side of it was just another aspect. So we thought about this, and I had a team that I

was working with that included my future partner Marcus Jones, who is a designer,

his background was basically packaging and retail, but he had become more involved

in screen, and a brilliant young screen designer and director Jason Keeley. We wrote

ourselves a brief that said we wanted to make Carlton part of the ITV network, but

for Carlton to be the star of the network, so the solution to that was to come up with

a star within a star. So we added a star to the Carlton name, wherever it lived. Within

that there would be a star within a star. The bigger star was really Carlton. Beneath

that it would say ITV.

These idents were much more showy and flashy - in this case it was very much about

the heart, but there were other icons, one was a pupil of the eye - the highlight of

the eye was heart shaped. They were all kind of semi-abstract some completely CG,

others incorporating bits of live action like the eye, as well as doing the onscreen

branding, we also did a sequence which ran in cinemas for quite a while. Carlton was

selling screen time in cinemas – so it was, that was a star, like a poker, a blacksmiths

poker, forging a star in the heat amongst the coals of the blacksmith’s fire, and you

were stamping the star on the screen.

So they had a lot more impact, they were glossy and shiny and had big impact and

sound, it was a way of literally stamping the Carlton name on there, while retaining

the link to ITV, which ITV hated, but they couldn’t do much about it, because Carlton

were the big fish. They wielded a lot more power. At one point I was given the on

screen idents for ITV, which were sort of slice of life- they had taken cameras around

the country and they would film housewives, people on bicycles, children playing in

playgrounds and they were rather – I won’t say drab but the way I saw them they were

very much documentary like. They were not at all flashy or glossy, and this was one of

the things that Carlton hated about them. They didn’t want those they on. They said

“we’re not having those on our screen, so get rid of them”. So in the middle of their

production of that work, I was kind of given access to their material and was told can

you play around with this, can you do something with this, what can you do? What can

we save for ours? It was really quite awkward. The other designers were quite good

natured about it, not that they had any choice in the matter. But in the end we worked

out these storyboards and went ahead and created these idents.

“ S p r e a d l i k e a V i r u s ”

I remember we did a meeting at Central to explain to them how they would now be

using Carlton’s idents. It is very difficult because you convince the client to make a

big dramatic change and then you point out that it’s not good enough to send out a

memo to everyone to say this is what is going to happen. You’ve got to really get them

to buy into it, to believe it, and they said ‘ok well you’ve made me believe it, you go

and tell them’. So, you end up being the one who ends up going on a sort of roadshow

to explain to people why you’ve done this, and people will sit there, in a boardroom -

dozens of them, heads of departments, heads of drama, BAFTA winning producers of

sports programmes, dramas, comedies and so on saying ‘convince me, what is so cool

about these, why should we be having this shit on our screens’ and you have to stand

up and say this is the logic this is where you are as a business, this is what your parent

business thinks is right in this market. It was at a point where you had this patchwork

of different franchises throughout Britain, which were all competing with one another

but which as far as the viewer was concerned, were all offering the same product. If

you were a fan of Coronation Street from Birmingham, and you travelled to Devon for

your holidays, you wanted to watch it in the evening you wanted to watch Coronation

Street, and you could, but you, it would be via a different provider, and there was no

logic as to your point of view as to why you couldn’t just watch Granada where you

had come from or Central if you were from Birmingham. They were struggling to make

sense of how they should present themselves in a new world.

They had the power to spread beyond London and be Carlton nationally. The more

they bought up the more Carlton could just spread like a virus. Of course you’re in the

face of a lot of local opposition from people who want the sense of locality. The sense

of being from Birmingham in the case of Central. It’s one of those things, yes to some

extent the work we were doing was about homogenising what was on offer, but the it

was business led, not design led. These were design solutions to business problems.

9 10

long period of time, as you do also the signs on your buildings, the heading on your

stationary, other things which are real and concrete and physical. It is easy to update

a website, but to update a range of stationary or printed literature, vehicles, all those

things, because of course what we did was we prided ourselves on presenting the

complete kit, so we’d say here’s your O.B van, here’s your helicopter, here’s your

umbrella, here’s your mouse mat.

P r o d u c i n g t h e i d e n t s

We created the idents at one of our trusted post production facilities. They built a

big 3D heart and lit it and so on, and it was animated against a graphic background

and I think the sparks were probably an effects shot that might have been shot for

something else and was just used to create a little momentary explosion. One of

Jason’s favourite was lens flares, he liked putting lens flares on, but the thing is that

stuff like this, you would have to go to a Soho facility company and pay a lot of money

to make it. Now you probably would make it in house. I remember at dunningeleyjones

we ended up on much tighter budgets, and there was more of a demand for us to

make money from jobs, so we ended up commissioning freelance animators and

effects people to do stuff on laptops, and it was indistinguishable. You could do it

at high res, you could do stuff that was indistinguishable from really complicated

expensive stuff. Things that were once complicated we could now do in After Effects.

All that has become a lot more accessible, it is a lot easier to do, and in a way, it has

become cheaper, and people know it has become cheaper, so a company like Lambie-

So if you give us a problem which is basically a business problem, then it’s usually

this kind of balancing act, this kind of compromise between this plus this you can’t

have one without another you have to have both, so you’ve got to find a neat way of

tying them together. In this case, Carlton won. But this was not our finest hour. This

was struggling to reconcile lots of conflicting demands from ITV, from Carlton, from

ourselves. It was a reasonably elegant solution to a difficult problem.

But of course, they didn’t win forever, and like all these things, they wear out, they

outlive their usefulness, and they get retired. It was a period when we were moving

out of the regionalism. It’s almost like we’re now moving back to it actually, because

there is a taste now for things to be local. I think, when I say take sides I think I have

a lot of sympathy for that, but I don’t want to see things homogenised in the way like

every high street in the country having the same chains and shops. You don’t want

that, you want to see local stores and local names and so on. You want to hear local

accents. So, yes it makes sense that these companies have got a sense of locality

and a sense of place, but in today’s media landscape, it’s as easy to see what is on

TV in San Francisco and Shanghai as it is in London. It’s no longer a local world in that

sense.

B r a n d L o n g e v i t y

Some of the branding outlived the company. You’d still see it on screen. You know,

production credits, because you’d see, it’d say at the end that it is a production for

Granada, a production for Anglia, a production for Carlton. If you make a programme

you might make hundreds of episodes of a popular show over the years and each

of those carries the signature of the company that has produced it. It’s alright to

change this onscreen, within a junction, that is just switching tapes, and broadcasting

a different thing. But you’ve got a vast library of content that you are going to want

to continue to sell, and in some cases sell abroad for years to come, and it’s got the

old name on it. So what do you do? You can’t go and physically just cut and paste

them. You’ve got to go in and you’ve got to laboriously digitally cut and paste new

sequences onto all of these programmes.

That is a hugely expensive job. That is a job which in itself is more than we’d ever be

paid to do the branding in the first place. It is a vast job and it takes forever, you’ve

got to employ a dedicated staff of people to do it. So that process lags way behind

the on-screen branding. It’s something that you have to be committed to do, for a

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“here’s your umbrella”

Sequence and endframe from Carlton’s 1999 Drama ident

A Carlton International Media endboard broadcast in 2017

The logo on their Knightsbridge offices

Entrance at Carlton’s St Martins Lane Headquarters

Carlton Studios branded camera

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Carlton’s Email Service

Project DetailsCodename - WeddingsCreative Director - Brian EleyDesigner / Director - Jason KeeleyTransmission Dates - 06/09/99 to 25/10/02Designed and Produced at Lambie-Nairn

Nairn couldn’t grow as it did, making the money it did, being able to pay to have a

lot of people in house, because it was doing these expensive jobs, and charging

a reasonably large healthy fee. People imagine that millions were made but half a

million for a complete corporate rebrand would have been a very healthy budget back

then. It is usually a lot less.

A p p l y i n g t h e b r a n d

What you do is think is there a big idea, that will be the same idea whether it’s it can

exist whether it’s on a piece of paper, on a screen, in a web browser, on a side of a

building, on a vehicle, is there something that is that portable and flexible, that has

meaning for this particular product or service, this client or organisation. Is there

something you can reduce to a tiny element what is portable. If you start from that

end, without thinking too much about all of the possible applications, then you once

you come to do the applications, it goes there, it goes there it goes there. You’d

create these rather glib presentations saying, here’s your umbrella, here’s your mouse

mat, here’s your helicopter, and it would all work because you’re not saying oh now

how do we do a car? With the people, with the [Carlton 1993 identity] faces, that’s

what I’m saying, that was a short lived idea because it wasn’t really portable. You

couldn’t put those people everywhere- it would be impractical or inappropriate. So

you end up with simple you usually end up with simple graphic iconography, which

says something fundamental.

There is something I did for Discovery Kids. It often comes from the client. There

was a line that came up in a conversation with the client that said that “At Discovery

Kids we know that kids are really hungry for discovery” Hungry for Discovery. So,

what I drew was a pair of what looked like false teeth or they looked like a bear trap,

with two big wedges, with sharp teeth like a cartoon drawing of a crocodile. And

that became the icon used everywhere. The idea being I’m hungry for Discovery. Its

humorous because you can bite someone on the bum, chew something, or run and

chase antelope or whatever. You could actually bite chunks out of things. I don’t think

we actually did it but you could have a stationary with a bite mark chomped out of

the page. So that’s a big idea because it has lots of flexibility. It has lots of traction.

You can do anything with it. It’s always brings a certain humour, some character. It’s

not just the logo. In fact, one of the things we had it eat was the logo, because that

audience, that young audience, kids, would appreciate that. They don’t care where

the programme has some from, they just want to see things being destroyed and

eaten, and chasing each other around. It has a very small expression - it is easy to

draw, it’s easy to talk about.

I n f l a t e d C o s t s

People would say we’d cost the BBC millions to have a balloon, but it didn’t actually,

it wasn’t like that, there weren’t the sums of money that people imagine. The balloon

came from Richard Branson’s company, but it was a physical balloon for the launch

and the most famous idents. Later on the technology caught up, and the possibility

to do CG balloons. So you’d have the balloon doing things that if you knew anything

about ballooning it would be outrageous, like you had the balloon at night - you don’t

fly balloons at night, it is dangerous. But if you did a CG balloon, you could do that.

With that balloon, they went to great pains to fly a real balloon, for instance to along

the coast of the West country by St Michaels Mount, which is a famous rock formation

and a castle. People wrote into the BBC to say ‘I didn’t pay my licence so people could

fly off to Arizona and shoot in the Arizona desert, or in the Amazon’. Sorry? - That was

shot in the West country. They shot themselves in the foot a bit by making things look

so big and glossy and epic, because people assumed they were big, glossy and epic,

costing Hollywood budgets, and it wasn’t. The irony being we were trying to bring the

BBC to the Nation, which I think is still the best solution to the BBC One problem ever.

It was regarded by suspicious by some viewers who thought it was too lavish. The

great problem with a lot of these things is that when you get a change of management

they want to change everything. So you do something that gets used and then gets

thrown away. So the ones who spent the money are not the people throwing them

away and commissioning new ones!

S o u n d D e s i g n

We’d usually include notes on audio with the storyboards. In fact, when looking at a

kit of parts, you say this is your logo this is your colour palette, this is your graphic

iconography, this is your visual style, this is your audio. I was very keen on that and

it was usually possible to build kind of a brief for the designer, so you could say

something simple like it’s sharp and spikey, or it’s slow and melodic, or you could

be much more specific. But we worked with the same sound people. So the audio

for [Carlton] was probably done by a company called Hum, based in Camden. Joe

Glasmann is someone we worked very closely with and you would go to him with a

very specific brief, but it would never be more than a couple of paragraphs about

15 16

what the audio was trying to do, and he would come up with musical solutions to it.

The audio is very specific to that work. As it is on all of our work.

M i c h a e l G r e e n

Michael Green was a famously difficult character. He was used to getting his own

way. I saw with my own eyes his staff be quite afraid of him, or afraid of revealing

things to him. I was once in a meeting presenting to one of his quite senior TV exec,

and suddenly Michael Green appeared at the door and was like “oh what have you

got” and this guy got up from his seat and just blocked the door. Just stood in front

of him and said “Michael it’s nothing, there’s nothing going on here. Nothing to see.

Ok? We’re just having a chat. Nothing here. If there is anything coming up I’ll let you

know, alright Michael?” and he just put his arms out. Green was like “alright, ok”

and he just went off and it was like he was saving himself, and us from interrogation,

which Michael on a whim might have said “this is all shit I don’t want this” and you

could have said to him that this is six weeks down the road and we’ve spent a tonne

of money he’d say “oh forget it, money isn’t important.”

A t t i t u d e s t o w a r d s d e s i g n i n t e l e v i s i o n

Martin had a special place for designers in television, because he was sort of very

successful early on, and he was associated with big success. The first big iconic

success was Channel Four, which could be spoken of as a technical breakthrough as

it used computer graphics at a time when you had to go to California to get computer

graphics. Its also a classic example of a logo that continues to be used, he is still the

designer of it, even though he has had nothing to do with what appears on screen for

decades. It is still very much his. When you’re associated with success, people want

to work with you. They know that they are going to pay a premium for that advice,

and so they will challenge you, because usually they are challenging people, but

they will respect what you have to say so, we managed to raise ourselves out of that

perception that we were like the backroom boys and girls that worked on the daily

grind of TV, it was more like that we were responsible for the big stuff.

You’d often have prickly relations with in-house teams. If you were hired, it means that

they were not hiring their in-house designers, which I can understand how that would

feel, and you had to be diplomatic about pointing out to them that you were creating

something they would then own and use, and that they could develop it as long as

they kept to the basic rules, because their boss had paid a lot of money for

the rules, so please follow them. Most designers in that position were very

understanding. We were understanding of their position because we had

all come up the same route - we had all been through that. The status of

graphic design in television I have seen in recent years, and I think it is the

impact of things like American series like The Sopranos and Mad Men and

Game of Thrones and things like that. I think there is now more attention

paid to the packaging of programmes, but channel identity? I see very little

in channel identity that really makes me sit up. It is hard to replicate that

moment when you looked at something, I mean I used to look at stuff that

Lambie-Nairn had done before I was involved and I used to think how the

hell did they get away with that? You’re looking now at BBC Two - they’ve

brought back idents designed and directed by Dan Barber at Lambie-Nairn,

and they are using them now on air. That is really clever stuff, and the fact

that it can be brought out 20 years later and reused and still look very

modern, and still be very ambiguous enough to be there before a current

affairs show or a drama or whatever is a real testament to that work. It was

deep thinking and beautifully crafted. That is really impressive work. I don’t

see that kind of thing. Some of the spin off channels from Channel Four

have got ingenious things. I think it is because there are so many channels,

and they are just one of a number of options. Previously they would have

been one of three or four buttons on your remote.

Now you just don’t have that, and the novelty has worn off. In some cases,

it has been dispensed with altogether. You don’t really have idents in the

old sense. It is interesting to see the BBC One’s Martin Parr’s sequences

for BBC One. I mean, that is almost going back to the Carlton people. To be

BBC One is really tough. Somehow by being populist and down to earth and

self-effacing and casual about it you kind of destroy what is special about

BBC One. So I think it is the end of a road there. I think if I were in charge of

that now I would go back to something much more graphic and much more

drama. It risks trivialising the news, I’m sure that there are older people

looking at it and going “My god this is so embarrassing what are they doing.

She has hardly got any clothes on. I mean how can we talk about Syria?”

I have sympathy for that. I think it is a very delicate area. I think some of

the skills have been lost, which may be something to do with the desktop

production area- the quick and casual way in which things can be created.

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You used to shoot things on 35mm and it was like cinema style production values. So

you were very careful about what was shot and how you edited it.

L a m b i e - N a i r n a n d d o t c o m c o m p a n i e s

The internet was something that was a rumour. It was something we weren’t really

bothered about. With that explosion of online business, companies like Lambie-Nairn

were quite perplexed and worried that they didn’t know how to react because there

were people coming through the door offering large sums of money, swaggering in

having become a big well-funded internet start-up, and we couldn’t work out what on

earth their business was. They were saying we’re not making any money- we’ll make

a loss for a few years and then we’ll start making money. It was hard to get a handle

on their business for those of us who weren’t native to that world. Martin found it very

hard. We passed up a lot of opportunities, struggling to understand it. I think that

anxiety has now gone. But this was on the cusp.

You’ll find if you go now to Lambie-Nairn that there is very little of the famous work

they had done. Martin was had worked briefly for the BBC and for London Weekend

and he’d worked around as a junior designer, and he was fascinated by advertising

and the way advertisers were able to be so convincing and had such powerful status

when dealing with banks and big businesses and big retail brands and how designers

were considered with such contempt in television. Its production centre is a little

factory. The daily grind is mainly news and current affairs. The big glossy production

stuff is done elsewhere mostly by freelancers and there all brand people. But the job

for actually cranking out television on a daily basis is a rather mechanical business.

It’s always been a very ephemeral medium. You don’t keep stuff, you put it out.

I started out at Nationwide which was a nightly current affairs show, very loosely

current affairs - sometimes it was entertainment. So you were just running around

doing things at the last minute getting them on air and then throwing away. Most

of the stuff we did was Letraset on cardboard, pantone papers and so on. It was all

very disposable. Martin was forming ideas about how he thought television should

be seen, and how channels should behave. He wanted the status and respect that

advertisers had when they handled big brands. So he put together what was effectively

a production company, and most of the designers that he worked with were people

who had long term ambitions to direct, and be commercial directors, because that

is where the money was. When I joined as creative director, I was the first creative

director they had because up until that point there was nobody else. There was just

Martin. He didn’t have a title. The others were designers and directors - people like

Rob Kelly, Charlotte Castle, Dan Barber. They the people who did the clever stuff. But

they were directors, and the company was run like a production company.

So that was its business and it was very much concentrated on screen. It was all

very screen oriented. There came a point where we were looking at other aspects of

Carlton Media Group, we were doing their stationary, their buildings, their signage.

So there is a lot more money in that. A lot more visibility. It is a lot more complex, it

becomes more and more specialist and you start to have to work with people who are

not screen based people, they are not thinking in terms of the screen. I was working

with Marcus who came from packaging. So there was a packaging designer who was

very concerned with the minute details of a beautiful bottle or packaging. So it’s a

completely different range of skills and sensibilities. So we were doing more and more

of this big corporate work and less and less of the screen. Frankly there was less of a

demand for it as well. It became harder and harder to spend relatively large sums of

money on these short sequences when it could be spent on other things to do with

the brand.

To some extent Martin was talking himself into this position, because he wanted to

leave behind the world of screen, although he loved it, but he wanted to get more and

more of the big branding. Brands like Nike or Apple, the big iconic brands of the 90s

which were so much more about what their stores looked like or their products. So,

there came a point where Martin decided he was going to cash in. He was going to

sell the company. It was going to be good for everybody because we’d have greater

investment and we could recruit more widely and so on. The company was sold to

Martin Sorrels group, WPP, who own a huge number of big advertising agencies.

Lambie-Nairn went from being in control of its own destiny and having one character,

to becoming part of a larger empire, a bit like some of these TV companies that

merged into ITV. So from that point on they became chasing more and more clients

like banks. We had already branded most of the TV in the UK, and a lot in Europe,

and we were doing more and more work in the states. When I joined in 1994, Martin

was beginning the process of working for the BBC, and he was devoting all of his

time to doing dozens of presentations to various important people within the BBC

departments. The deal was that if I would do abroad, he would concentrate on the

BBC. So that’s what we did. I was running projects in Belgium, Flanders, France, and

in the States so things like discovery kids, Sci-Fi channel. The business was going

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more corporate and less attention being paid to the TV side. Now the business is very

much… they have clients who are banks and insurance companies and hotel groups

and that’s where they concentrate, and so consequently, they don’t have people in

house who know how to do the on-screen.

C r e a t i n g O 2

One of the thing I worked on around that time was O2. Those are real bubbles! Whether

they are now I don’t know, but they were initially they were real bubbles shot in a

tank. We’d often used bubbles. There was a technique. We used model makers to do

special effects like fire and bubbles and things like that. We were quite experienced

at doing bubbles. I worked on the naming. I was the guy who had to stand up in front

of the BT board and say that the name of your new company will be O2. Because it’s

the chemical formula for oxygen, which is essential for life. O2 would be essential for

your life. And they were like “ok, let’s see this then” so we worked on it from there. It

is very hard to make oxygen visible unless it is a bubble. I don’t know how we got away

with that. And the logo took about 5 minutes to design.

22

Image Credits

Brian Eley and Jason Keeley (Cover, 13)Carlton Media (2, 7, 14)Carlton (2, 4, 6, 12, 14)ITV (13)Transdiffusion.org (14)Getty (14)Lambie-Nairn (6)BBC (18)O2 (21)

C B B C & C b e e b i e s

It is remarkable how some of the work continues to be visible. O2 is one example but

one of the last big projects I worked on was CBBC and Cbeebies, which is still kind of

there. Cbeebies is still arguably the same. The little bug – the idea was that the BBC

was infected with children’s television. There was a very strict rule about what you

could and couldn’t do with the BBC logo, the 3 blocks. You can’t turn it on its side or

see it in perspective or anything like that. So the first thing I did when I got the job was

to turn it, and Martin saw and was like ‘hmmmm’, and I was like well it’s for kids, it has

got to be playful. So it was about breaking your own rules. Kids brands are always fun

because it’s always very humorous, and Martin’s work always had a sense of humour.

He is a fun man.

C h a n g i n g M e d i a L a n d s c a p e

This work belongs to a very specific time in the story of television. Now, the whole

nature of watching TV is different. You might not watch TV at all, if you’re a younger

person you may use things like iPlayer or whatever, or you may just watch stuff on

YouTube. So the need for these to orchestrate a junction break and take you in and

out of commercials and back to the programme and to talk about other programmes

that you could see later on and next week has gone. So the need for this kind of

thing, or the desire for this for the feeling that there is a show unfolding is kind of

gone. There is no need for it anymore. Seeing that and understanding that means that

someone like myself feels ‘you don’t really need me now do you?’ because there is

nobody is asking for that anymore.

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“Essential for life”O2 launch brand image (2002)

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