1964-74 1974-91 1974-79 
The next facelift occured at the end of BBC2's tenth anniversary year - this new ident was introduced in between Christmas 1974 and New Year 1975. Once again it was a mechanical device operated live on air: the blue lines would spin off to the right and the white lines to the left, before coming back together again round the other side to re-form the '2' symbol.  
Left: the clock continued virtually unchanged, although other designs were tested out. Around 1978/79 both the clock and the symbol could be sometimes seen with a black background; it is not clear whether this was a permanent change or whether they only appeared like this on occasion. Right: few surprises in the slide department either - other than the changing '2' logo, this simple layout would remain almost unchanged from the start of the 1970s through until 1986. The stripy 2 would last some four-and-a-half years before being replaced by one of the most familiar symbols ever on British television...
1979-86 
BBC2 made ident history by introducing the very first computer-generated ident in the UK. Introduced sometime between March and July 1979 (can anyone confirm exactly when?), it was played out live each time from solid state computer memory.
Watch a clip (no audio)   
The twin-striped '2' had already been in use on slides (above) for some months before it made it onto the ident.  
Left: a menu for BBC2's early evening line-up one Tuesday in March 1981. Right: there was no particular standard design for trailers and evening captions in this period; here the '2' on this 'Des O'Connor Tonight' caption bears no relation whatsoever to the normal '2'.  
The mechanical clock (left) continued to be used for a while until an electronic version was introduced on 6 September 1980 (right). 
In September 1983 BBC1's schools programmes moved to BBC2, in a sequence known as Daytime on Two. Programmes were preceded by a new yellow version of the BBC2 symbol. Both black and yellow versions were finally retired in March 1986, after nearly seven years' use.
1986-91 
On Easter Monday 1986, viewers tuning to BBC2 and expecting to see the familiar orange stripey logo were in for a shock. Without warning, everything had suddenly turned white! This new ident was intended to accompany a move upmarket by the channel. However its main achievement was instead to make the general perception of BBC2 'dull' and 'worthy'. As with the late 60s ident, it used the three colours that make up a television picture - red, green and blue. The same colours were also used on the new BBC logo introduced at around the same time.
Watch a clip (no audio)  
Two different types of BBC2 caption, from 22nd May and 30th July 1987 respectively. The first was promoting a BBC2 programme on BBC2; the second promoting a BBC2 programme on BBC1 (many apologies for the lousy picture quality on this one). Quite why they needed different styles is beyond me...  
By 1989 computer-generated slides had been introduced. These two were seen over on BBC1 on 25th October and 1st November 1989 respectively. 1964-74 1974-91 | 
