1998-2001 2001-03 2001-02   
Another year - and another new set of idents. By now, BBC Choice had lost its national variants, and was heading well down the road to transforming into the youth channel BBC3. So on Friday 6th July 2001, the hearts were finally dumped, and replaced by three idents all featuring three orange boxes. The soundtrack to these idents was changed every so often, usually using a current dance hit. Watch a clip  
Trailers broke away from the standard BBC style, and now also featured the orange boxes.  
Left: an animated 'coming up next' caption. Right: a more intrusive caption - the three spinning boxes popped up seemingly at random during programmes, to plug some other programme that's on later. Other Choice distractions included the inevitable channel DOG in the top left hand corner, which was made worse between November 2000 and April 2002 by the addition of the BBC Choice website address. You can see this DOG's dinner in most of these shots.   
On Friday 11th January 2002, with BBC Choice's successor BBC3 still seeming as far away from launch as ever, the idents changed once again - but not very much this time... Watch a BBC Choice start-up   
Rare sightings of BBC Choice programme slides. Note that the font used is Gill Sans Extrabold, rather than the Gill Sans Bold used normally. The first two were seen in early 2002 on both BBC Choice and BBC2, and are based around the orange box theme. Below, a static slide used to link into BBC Choice's Glastonbury coverage in June 2002.  
Left: Oops... Right: We'll be back...
2002-03    
From the start of December 2002, builders started ripping through the BBC Choice idents...  
Left: if any viewers were still in any doubt, all became clear from the start of January 2003. From this point on the regular orange box idents were no longer used. Right: then on 19th January the countdown began - to the launch of Choice's successor. 
Above: shown on BBC Choice, a pre-launch 'teaser' animation for BBC3 - could this have been a rejected ident concept? The final programme on BBC Choice, a repeat of the late Christopher Price's interview with Kylie Minogue, was transmitted at midnight on 8th February 2003 (the next night's programming consisted entirely of previews for BBC3). 
Then at 7.00pm on 9th February BBC3 finally launched... 1998-2001 2001-03 | 
