Though my opinion of Hitscene is so and so, the music of the early 70s wasn't that bad, what was interesting was the format.

For most of the time, they showed the entire video clip without any titles, or voicing over the intro (gavin wood on countdown), and the starts and ends of videos on Hitscene for most of the time were cut clean with NO fancy fades/switches.

Would of been a dream if Countdown was presented in this style. As much as I loved countdown in the 80s, the way it was presented became so mashed up and mixed, and often videos were sliced big time. I got the feeling toward the end that they wanted to try and show 50 music videos within the 50 minutes they were alotted, just like a K-Tel compilation.

Yes Mark that is true. The "adult" evening music shows like Nightmoves, Music Video, Rock Arena etc showed clips in full with no voiceovers, but perhaps Countdown wanted to create a less "sterile" feel, with its live studio audience, studio performances, interviews, voiceovers etc. Countdown also wanted to cram a lot in, particularly as it became so influential in making or breaking aritsts, hence the truncation and butchering of clips.

As to the titles over the clips, partly it was technology and partly record company pressure I suspect. When Hitscene was made, onscreen titles were very labour intensive and difficult to produce. Video technology was in its infancy, titles couldn't be just inserted in real time like they are in rage, they had to be manually prepared and layed over as part of the video pre-production. I don't think Countdown started titling its videos until 1982 or 1983.

Without a host introducing every clip in some of these shows, titling was kinda necessary otherwise people wouldn't know what each song was. But I also suspect (but don't know) that record companies began insisting on it as a kind of anti-piracy strategy. With titles, the video was indelibly stamped in a unique way (i.e. obviously recorded from Countdown, or Rock Arena, or whatever). No titles and there's no way to prove where a copy of a clip came from. How that would help I don't know.

I prefer my clips "clean" too, but that will never happen on TV. What really gets up my goat is when you buy DVDs of music clips that have titles on them!! Totally unncessary and annoying!

Yeah, clip, some good points there. The titling is actually the least of my annoyances - I like the way rage done it when it first aired in 1987. Where rage shows their logo first, then the title of the song, back in the late 80s, rage showed the logo and the song title at once, thus less interuption to the clip.

Music Video - Far out man, that is a show I haven't heard anyone mention in yonks, I remember watching that show often on Ch 10 often overnights - I think this was about 1983 to 1986?

And talk about DVDs that are butchered, I got the greatest hits from Dire Straits DVD, the one with the blue cover, and aside from the songs having titles impressioned into the clips, some of the clips have lost the first so many seconds of the intro - very bad job by universal on that one.

Music Video was awesome. The rage of its day. I remember seeing for the first time the whole 9 minutes of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" on it, wondering how it was going to end, and I was hooked. No other video show would dare play stuff like that.

IIRC Music Video ran from 1983 to 1987 - it disappeared a few months before rage started.

Didn't John Torv pass away in 2013?

Oh yeah, that is a bad one. Not only are the clips truncated, they have undergone double standards conversion from PAL to NTSC and back to PAL. That's why they look so blurry with the colours ruined, particularly noticeable on "So Far Away". Double standards conversion should be a criminal offence. The DVD was put together in the USA and our lazy record companies here just converted it back to PAL. CRIMINAL!

I have 3 of the 4 clips from "Brothers In Arms" in full from original PAL sources and no titles. I am hoping to get the title track in full from a source soon in a few weeks, very hard to get for some reason.

I remember 'Rock Around The World's' Basia Bonkowski took over from John Torv at one stage. 1987 seem to be a year that many Music Video's shows went off the air.

I remember watching an interview about 'CountDown', where they said that in the 80's, they didn't want to end up being just another music video clip show. I think it may have been on 'Love Is In The Air' or 'It's A Long Way To The Top'.