TV Whirl - Celebrating 20 Purple Years
1095 days since our last missed update

TV Whirl has reached a big milestone this month, as the site has hit its 20th birthday. It's hard to believe it was actually all the way back in March 2001 that I uploaded the first scratty few pages for 'Terence's TV World' to Geocities, albeit a site which given zero promotion probably wasn't actually seen by anyone until the first redesign in Revision 2 in June 2001, when I also started to appear more on the various presentation forums. With the site eventually tweaked to Terence's TV Whirl in August of that first year. Even in all those early incarnations the colour purple was used heavily, with the Harlow Solid Italic font for the logo introduced in the June, and both of these are features that have remained associated with the site in various forms since.

I've always made a big thing about the independence of the site too with our tagline 'Independent Since 2001' replacing our original 'A Whirling Mass of Television and Poor Web Design' when a lot of the swirls were dropped (though as you may notice to mark this special occasion some of these old 'favourites' are back). We did actually have a small number of video contributions in the early days, however the majority of the 5000+ clips added in the last 20 years since have come entirely from myself from a still growing collection. Many people have suggested it in the past, but by choice I still have no team or partners at TV Whirl. While I do get along great with many other people in the pres community, and will always add any factual corrections supplied by people, it does mean this site is all ultimately one person's work, and that's something different. And I'm one person who makes no effort to curry favour with television personalities, agencies or designers so while that may mean we won't get access to exclusive news or tidbits, it does mean you're guaranteed an honest and raw editorial when visiting. That's something I'm fiercely proud of, and remains one of the site's biggest principles.

It's always hard to know exactly what the future holds for pres sites, but I do have a lot of plans in the works to continue the mission started 20 years ago. Some of these new things will be going live in the next few days so keep your eyes peeled. But also watch us on our social media feed at @TesTVWhirl as we'll be celebrating with a lot of birthday content this week. Thank you to all who've supported us and continue to support us over the years, and join us as we celebrate 20 Purple Years!

New Player - 28/3/2021

As part of our birthday celebrations, we have also launched an updated version of the player to the website. Videos are now streamed rather than just being static files, in order to improve speed, performance and the ability to seek through them. It also allows us to add some new features. First up are mashups, where if you switch the audio track using the earphones icon, you'll be given the random audio from another clip of similar length. Some will be dull, some will be terrible, and some may be hilarious. If you get any gold mashups out though, be sure to share them with everyone!

The second new thing that has been added are subtitles. These are all manually transcribed as they take into account a little more than just the spoken word, but also how some of your classic idents would be written down. You can find a lot of examples of this so far in the Tyne Tees, Yorkshire, Granada, Central LWT and Thames ident sections, with more to continue to be added over time. A small 888 icon can be seen on the description for any which contain these.

#20PurpleYears

~ Terence, TV Whirl Webmaster