Via Rhys Marshall, here's another Christmas junction from a very different era. Gone is the striped BBC logo, gone is the swirly globe, still very much present and correct is the Bladed 2 because it was almost (but not quite) impossible to kill. In place of the Lambie-Nairn ambient globe we have a big ol' Balloon, picked out in red and gold. It was going to be in blue, because it's a globe yeah? but then they realised that - although all the initial idents were filmed live and verite, with a genuine Balloon in the actual sky, there were inevitably going to be occasion when someone would want to strip the bloody thing into pre-recorded footage. Which necessitated some CSO shooting. On bluescreen. So they went with a red Balloon instead, which is probably just as well as it's more distinctive this way. In blue, it would just be a regular old globe. In red, it's specifically BBC One's globe. Red has been BBC One's colour ever since, although I never thought it suited it much.

Anyway, I should have saved all that for a later upload because the Balloon's not even in this file. *A* balloon is, a dangling red number intended to look like a bauble in a tastefully minimalist design that's one of the better ones they used during the Balloon's tenure. It's Boxing Day! We're coming out of the second of three Men Behaving Badly specials that Christmas. After the massive success of the Only Fools and Horses wrap-up trilogy over Christmas week in 1996, they tried to do the same thing with the decidedly edgier Men Behaving Badly two years later. Unfortunately this show wasn't the sort of cosy quasi-family viewing Only Fools was, and the BBC got in hot water for putting jokes about impotence, pornography and crusty tissues on Christmas Day. After the watershed, mind; it wasn't as if it was on directly after the Queen's sodding speech.

Anyway, we're out of the episode and (via a charming sting where the mini-balloon mutates into a Santaman and flies away in delight) into a trailer for the last episode of the entire series. Enjoy Neil Morrissey's terrible false moustache and a brief glimpse of Lesie Ash's real face before some twat of a surgeon fucked it up.

Next, because this is actually BBC One NORN IRON, a trailer for the province-specific Review of the Year. And it was quite a year for Northern Ireland in 1998, of course, what with the Good Friday Agreement bringing a formal "end" to the Troubles, although one or two shitheads disagreed and murdered dozens in Omagh a couple of months later by way of letting us know.

Over on BBC Two: Matthew Modine and Diana Rigg, who's spent the past thirty odd years playing spidery widows in black lace, in The American. Next here on One: The Naked Gun 2 1/2.

Before that, the ident in full, in which a massive red bauble dangles in front of a shining silver-white snowy backdrop while a reindeer doesn't know what the fuck. Introducing French and Saunders! Featuring Joanna Lumley, the Spice Girls, Helen Mirren and Adrian Edmondson. He can't have been too hard to get hold of. Obligatory movie pisstake: Titanic. Directed by Edgar Wright.

But oh no! After the show it transpires that viewers right here in NORN IRON have been completely withight television altogether due to Par Problems caused by severe weather, necessitating an ENGINEERING INFORMATION slide and apology which glares at you slightly longer than it should.

Next, a trailer for an upcoming brand new sitcom which doesn't look too promising, and indeed wasn't. Did have its moments, though. I accidentally found myself watching the special on Millennium Night - mostly a two-hander between Burke and Dreyfus, and that was okay. Just two idiots talking in a room, in real-time, often funnier than any amount of wacky scenarios they could end up in.

Also in the New Year: the second series of Jimmy McGovern's The Lakes, a reliably grim (though suffused with deadpan humour) ensemble drama starring the Master as a gambling addict navigating a downward spiral.

Next on BBC One: Carry On at Your Convenience. Got to have Carry Ons at Christmas, and this is neither one of the better ones nor one of the unwatchably shit ones - ironic since it actually revolves around toilets. A perhaps ill-advised attempt at tackling contemporary issues - ie The Unions - its siding with the bosses over the workers probably contributed to it being the first in the series to lose money at the box office.

But! First it's Naked Gun 2 1/2 and another variation on that ident. That reindeer still has no idea what's going on.

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