[SteveRW]

No lens effect on this years christmas idents.

Well that's a stupid decision. It's the channel's motif now, and pretty easy to do.

They did the same thing when they adopted the  balloon as their motif. For the first two years they had no balloon in their Christmas idents. Unlike 1997 though, I suspect that the lens will still feature in the endboards and trails. So they are not entirely abandoning it this time.