The Jump 90s Archives : Volume 2
We’ve recently been trawling through the Jump Archives watching some old digibeta tapes and wanted to share some sequences that you might not be familiar with – or know that Jump had created.
These graphics were all made in the 90s when most of our work was in entertainment and comedy. Some are in 4:3 format – it took a while for widescreen to takeover completely.
Hope you enjoy them. If you have any questions, please drop us a message.
Miller Time with Johnny Miller:
These series of adverts were produced by TalkBack Productions for Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe in 1996. They were possibly the first ad-break takeovers on UK television … although don’t quote us on that. They ran on Channel 4 and took over the entire 3 minutes of the commercial break slot. The ads were a parody of late night American chat shows such as The Late Show with David Letterman and featured premium guest stars including Elle Macpherson and Alice Cooper.
TalkBack was brought in for their comedy expertise and these ads were produced by the lovely Jon Magnusson – who can be seen backstage with the showgirls in the clip. We had worked with Jon on the Smith & Jones titles (and later on all of the Graham Norton chat show titles) so he commissioned us to make the graphics.
During one of the adverts Jon used the phrase ‘Yipseee Dooo’. This became a very popular, much-used Jump catchphrase over the years.
This was Jump’s first outing into the world of commercials. The ads went on to win several D&AD pencils including a Team Award – which we are very proud to have been a part of.
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire:
In 1998 we received a phone call from Steve Springford at Celador Productions asking us to come in and talk about a top secret quiz show they were producing. We hadn’t worked with Celador before at that point. It transpired that Celador’s boss Paul Smith loved our work and wanted us to be part of the team.
Paul is one of the very few people in the industry we have met that works like this – and it was incredibly refreshing. He never asks people to pitch – which is very time-consuming and costly for small companies. He decides on the people he wants to work with, gets them all in to talk around a table – and proudly announces to everyone that he trusts them, knows they will do a good job and that we will all work it all out together. Amazing! It was the same on every job we worked with him after this one – and there were quite a few.
It’s hard to think now, that at the beginning no one knew if Millionaire was going to be a success. We admit that we thought it was a terrible name when we first heard it and was never going to fit on a TV-friendly logo. It became one of the most successful formats in television history and sold to well over a hundred countries around the world. Millionaire re-invented the quiz show – which was previously seen as a brightly coloured daytime format. This was prime-time, high production values, darker and high drama. As often happens in TV – when a format is a success – a lot of people follow. Millionaire spawned a tidal wave of quiz show formats over the following years – which to be fair, Jump worked on a high percentage of.
Unfortunately, there are no royalties in TV graphics – unlike music or photography. A lot of people presumed that as we had designed the logo and it was appearing all around the world, that we were indeed Millionaires ourselves. Sadly that was not the case. However we were certainly not complaining. We were hugely proud to have been such an integral part of a global TV phenomenon. Most importantly, Celador kept us super-busy for many years producing international versions of the graphics kit, multiple revamps of the titles – plus many other shows!
We will always be incredibly grateful for that phone call.
This original title sequence is one of a few that we’ve made over the years that features a Jumper. The lovely Mrs Kate Norley is one of the people transfixed by the overhead animating logo. The shapes being cast over peoples’ bodies and faces were all projected for real in the shoot.
You’ve Been Framed:
This title sequence was made in 1998 and announced the arrival of Lisa Riley as the presenter of ITV’s hugely popular home movie bloopers show. She replaced Jeremy Beadle who had been the presenter since the launch in 1990. Wikipedia says that this sequence and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire launched on the same day. We were certainly busy making graphics for ITV for a while. What a night for Jump graphics!
The fun, bouncy VHS tape characters (yes, who remembers VHS?!?!) were animated by Gerald (Jelly on the Telly) Crome – who has made us lots of glorious character animations over the years. See the leaping goldfish on our previous archive post.
The water bubble cylinder lights were filmed for real when we did the chroma key shoot with Lisa. Everything else in the sequence is CG.
Blind Date:
With Millionaire and You’ve Been Framed sitting proudly on our showreel – doors were swinging open fast. Did you know that Jump had designed titles for ITV’s iconic dating show, Blind Date? The series, presented of course by the brilliant Cilla Black, was so popular it felt a real honour to get to design some graphics for it.
We believe this is the first Blind Date title sequence that was presented in widescreen – and the first that featured live action shots of people. Normally, that is a treatment clients would steer away from, in case it looks like the people in the sequence are the actual contestants in the show. But the producers wanted a change of direction and a completely fresh look for this revamp.
True Story: After a mad rush to finish off the presentation we travelled over to ITV / LWT to pitch the title ideas to Michael Hurl, Head of Comedy. After 5 mins of polite chat Michael invited us to start. We stared at each other, waiting for the other person to reach towards their bag. Suddenly, we realised that neither of us had them – and somehow we had left the storyboards in the office! A very quick call was made to the Jump office to get the team to fax them over. Maybe that was the last time we ever used a fax machine.
Michael (who was a very busy man) asked us to start describing the ideas without the storyboards – which made for a very awkward 15 mins while the faxes were being sent.
Amazingly ….. we got the job
Britain’s Brainiest Kid:
OK, we lied. Not all the sequences here are from the 90s. This series premiered in 2001 on ITV and was one of the follow-up quiz shows we worked on for Celador Productions after Millionaire. The show was presented by Carol Vorderman and returned for a second series in 2002, co-hosted by Carole and Tess Daly. There were a few spin off series in the UK including Britain’s Brainiest Footballer and Britain’s Brainiest Cabbie.
The format was sold to quite a few countries which did create one obvious problem. The original UK title sequence was heavily text-based and featured the national flag. Neither of these things lend themself easily to reformatting into international versions. So we re-designed it to be based on objects instead – representing the wide range of subjects people were being tested on. The French version Le Grand Concours is in fact still running.
There will be more sequences and stories coming from the Jump Archives soon.
Keep your eyes peeled.