Ski Sunday
1978–BBC TwoDocumentary
A downhill run cut to Pop Looks Bach, and a theme that in Britain means winter rather than skiing.
Ski Sunday kept one opening title sequence, 47 seconds long, across season 43.
At 47 seconds, it opens well above the 37-second median for documentary sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on BBC Two in 1978, when The Old Grey Whistle Test, The Morecambe & Wise Show and The Goodies were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 43
47sFan upload of the 2020 intro; counting a season per year from the 1978 launch, that is the forty-third.
More documentary opening titles from the 1970s
2 sequences
Family Feud
Survey says — two families, a buzzer, and a theme rearranged for every host since Richard Dawson.
- Season 1
- Season 35
2 sequences
The Price Is Right
"Come on down" — the longest-running game show in American television, opening the same way for fifty years.
- Season 1
- Season 36
1 sequenceMonday Night Football
The programme that moved American football into primetime, and gave it a fanfare to arrive on.
- Season 2
1 sequenceSoul Train
An animated locomotive pulling into a city drawn in airbrush — the longest-running first-run syndicated show in American history opens like a record sleeve.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe World at War
Thames Television's twenty-six part history of the Second World War, still the benchmark for the form.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNBC Nightly News
Fourteen seconds of brass and a rotating globe, which is what a network evening bulletin has been reduced to.
- Season 47