"Welcome, lookers-in everywhere! This will eventually be BBC1"

Link to web site and iPlayer

"Sixty years ago today the BBC unveiled its first 'television symbol' - a moving logo to identify a TV channel - nowadays known as an 'ident'.

The new medium of television, the BBC decided, needed a new way to identify itself to viewers.

As television grew more polished, it needed something more exciting than a random selection of testcards in between the programmes.

The device known popularly as 'the bat's wings' (or, in some hostile newspapers, simply as 'the thing') was the solution it came up with.