Thanks for the welcome back, William -- though I wasn't aware I'd been away , just with too little time to post much of late owing to the UK's Working Time Regulations 1998 (Statutory Instrument No. 1833) and Working Time (Amendment) Regulations 2003 (Statutory Instrument No. 1684) failing to implement fully the really very simple provisions of European Council Directive 2003/88/EC. (But, having retired last Wednesday, my main concern now is not to end up spending just as much time in front of a computer terminal as I had to when working..!)

As well as that, I almost never venture on to the television section of these boards for the simple reason that we didn't have TV at home until about 1959, so that my experience of 1950s television is extremely limited.

But to get back to the real subject, yes, I understand the spreading radio-waves symbolism of the "bats' wings" all right, but I still think that the whole design, with its spikes and -- especially -- its "I can see you" atomic eye at the centre, which would not have looked at all out of place on the two-way telescreens of Orwell's 1984, is still very redolent of Gothic horror tales.

I think there was something rather creepy about a lot of 1950s BBC television design if this clip (from 1952?) is anything to go by (be patient: it's 3 minutes long, and it's the final minute of the sequence that I'm talking about).

Paper cutout children dancing counterclockwise around a five o'clock sundial which is mysteriously lit (the stars are out) in a sinister, everlasting twilight at the edge of the world. Surely they are kidnapped souls, condemned to whirl here in a cruel parody of playfulness until the end of time..?

William, I don't doubt that you are perfectly correct about the dancing children intro being used in 1953. I only gave "1952?" as a date because the info accompanying the clip on YouTube says:

The 3 transmitters shown at the end of the clip date it to after 1951 (opening of Holme Moss, the BBCs third TV transmitter) but the use of the coat of arms before programmes ended in late 1953, so it must be from between these dates.

I believe the audio on the clip is the original -- with its less-than-perfect sound quality (people who dub these old clips frequently use very anachronistic recordings) and long period of silence, bar the odd click or two, during the coat-of-arms section -- but I will ask the uploader of the clip for confirmation of this.

If your family bought a television in June 1953, William, I suspect it must have been because of the Coronation. And I'd guess that your house was pretty full on that day! That was the first time I ever saw television and (as I think I've written elsewhere on these boards) I remember the house of the only family in the village with TV being packed to the gunwales on that day. We couldn't see much on the tiny screen in the blacked-out room, but we saw it "properly" at the pictures a couple of days later -- in colour! (though it was still raining...)

F