Sky One

corblimey

Can someone settle a bet for me? I say that Sky One used to be called just "Sky" and that for a short while there was also a "Sky Two" which was why they changed the name of it. I don't remember even seeing Sky Two, so it may have been a rumour, but it was the official reason for the name change. This was back in the early 90s, as far as I remember.

Anyone else remember the story?

Stark

Yep, you have it there. I remember seeing Sky Two but it was short lived and crap (I don't even think it broadcast for a full day).

monkeyfudge

I remember they had a really annoying song that played in the advert for the launch of it.

Something like "Yeah baby you should see this, You should see Sky Two!"

horrible stuff...

The big pull for Sky Two was the fact that they showed Xena: Warrior Princess on it. Which was brand new at the time. You could only get Hercules on Sky One.

Oh and to start off with it was The Sky Channel.

You can see all the old promos here:

http://www.tv-ark.org.uk/otherchannels/skychannel.html

doh.ie

corblimey wrote:

I don't remember even seeing Sky Two, so it may have been a rumour, but it was the official reason for the name change. This was back in the early 90s, as far as I remember.

It wasn't the arrival of Sky 2 which prompted the renaming of Sky Channel to Sky One - this happened after the merger of BSB and Sky Television to form BSkyB (early in 1990). The idea was to make it the new BSkyB's flagship channel. It was at its coolest back in those days, too... (the second ident on this page)
http://thetvroom.com/area-c/sky/p-sky-one-past-a.shtml

Sky 2 arrived around 1996, and for a time Sky One was rebranded 'Sky 1' in response. http://thetvroom.com/area-c/sky/p-sky-defunct-d.shtml
It aired from 7pm-2am-ish daily, as it was sharing its analogue satellite transponder with some other channel and there wasn't enough space (or programming) for more round-the-clock scheduling.

Monkey Fudge, you're right about that promo - I remember that song - very weak. Still have that on a free Sky demo tape somewhere. A similarly bad song was used for the launch of Sky Sports 2 - the suited dancing man well with session singers! Hilariously bad.

radiospan

I remember I taped the opening night of Sky 2 because they had 5 hours of back-to-back X-Files.

corblimey

So basically, Sky Channel -> Sky One -> Sky 1 [Sky 2] -> sky onc?

jor el

But what ever happened to The Super Channel Or was that just a previous incarnation of Sky 2?

Edit:
Ah, there it is. It became the wonderfull NBC :rolleyes:

LFCFan

I still remember the day Sky started. DJ Kat was on. I remember they used to show stuff like I Dream of Jeannie.

tinkerbell

The DJ Kat show! I used to love that Think I still probably have taped episodes of that on some old videotapes