Jonathan Glazer directed bizarre new ident bumpers for Britain’s Channel 4

By Ignatiy Vishnevetsky  |  October 2, 2015 | 6:30pm
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Jonathan Glazer directed bizarre new ident bumpers for Britain’s Channel 4
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Britain’s Channel 4—best known in the US as the original home of cult items like The IT Crowd, Spaced, and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, and at home as a tide pool of reality shows and imported American TV—is in the middle of a large-scale rebranding effort. Part of that involves crafting new ident bumpers to run during the channel’s commercial breaks, and the task has fallen to none other than Jonathan Glazer, director of such crowd-pleasers as Under The Skin, Birth, and the greatest goddamn chocolate bar commercial ever made.

Unsurprisingly, the results are mesmerizingly opaque and more than a little creepy. Scored by Glazer’s Under The Skin collaborator, Mica Levi, the four new bumpers—which began airing on September 29th—re-imagine the pieces of Channel 4’s iconic nine-block logo as everything from crystal shards in a Matthew Barney-esque cave ceremony to synthetic blocks being cut in a sinister lab.

Channel 4 has a history of creative, effects-heavy bumpers, but Glazer pushes things further by never showing the full logo, which will reportedly be absent from the new branding materials. (Good luck to whoever has to tease what’s next on Big Fat Gypsy Weddings over that second one.) You can watch all of the new bumpers below.

 
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