The Money Programme (1983)

Opening titles for ‘The Money Programme’, a finance and business affairs series offering the latest stories from the world of business and work which ran from 1966 to 2010. Designer Rod Ellis’s opening titles began with the 1983 newly minted design of the pound coin tumbling in close-up in a computer-generated animation created by Chris Fynes, now working, having left the BBC in the previous year, at Crown Computer Graphics. In 1988 he went on to establish his own company called Infynity GFX with fellow designer John Speirs. Chris Fynes had previously designed and produced the titles for the 1978 and 1981 series of the programme. He was also an accomplished artist who did many political cartoons for ‘The Money Programme’ in the 1970s and 80s. The drawings were produced on the day for live transmission to a script read usually by the presenter Peter Hobday. Many of these cartoons were the subject of a two-month long exhibition held at the Stock Exchange in London. 
The footage used in the remainder of the 1983 ‘Money Programme’ title sequence was filmed by the production team, but included a shot of greyhounds coming out of the traps, which was at the suggestion of the designer Rod Ellis, who also hand-cut the shutter wipes out of black sugar paper for the film optical transitions and was responsible for the end animation of the ‘Money Programme’ logo.

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