Concept and creative process
The opening titles for ‘Nelson’s Column’, a sitcom set in the offices of local newspaper ‘The Herald’, starring John Gordon Sinclair. This title sequence was designed by Pete Wane to replace the original titles, designed by Andy Carroll, which had to be pulled from the show following a complaint by a member of the viewing public. Andy Carroll’s concept had involved buying in of a lot of stock footage of old printing presses which made up a large part of the title. Some eagle-eyed viewer must have stop-framed the whole title sequence and apparently discovered an offensive word on one of the newspapers going through the presses. They wrote to the BBC to complain, and so out went the printing presses and the whole sequence had to be remade. Pete Wane took on the task and used production footage of the lead actor in a variety of humorous work situations, overlaid with a screen dot and framed in animated torn paper vignettes, as if on a page of a newspaper.