[James2001]

The Brookside episodes website has been down for several days, which is disapointing... I probably should have downloaded the zip file while I had a chance. Lots of interesting tidbits in there and a good companion to watching the old episodes.

One thing that got mentioned in there was one of the characters saying "Meadowcroft Park" (one of the fake TV programmes they had characters watching) was "shown on a different day in Wales", which was likely a reference to how S4C showed Brookside out of prime time.

And on the S4C note, I remember when I was on holiday in Wales in 1996 noting that the break captions there had the S4C logo instead of the End of Part One/Part Two text, which was unusual. Though at the time Brookside (and Hollyoaks) had the Channel 4 logo on the break captions, so maybe they made those alternate captions to hide that. Sadly can't find any examples online.

Looking at what I can find, the Channel 4 logo on the break captions first appeared some time in 1995, it was still there in January 1999, but gone by March, looks like it was removed shortly before the Channel 4 revamp happened.


Another thing to notice is during the brief period after the show went 16:9, but still used the old titles cropped to 16:9, they used this bizarre mock-like font on the titles and break captions. Doubly bizarre because the old font was still in use on the end credits
   

Also as this video shows, the last few episodes made in 4:3 for some reason used this new break caption cropped to 4:3- so we have "ookside Close", as well as the picture of the close during the end credits cropped to 16:9 and back to 4:3 (but still used the uncropped opening titles).
www.youtube.com 

The episodes immediately prior to this still had the uncropped versions:
www.youtube.com