Just over a year ago I was involved in pitching for a show with a working title of 'Surgery Live'.  We didn't win the pitch and the show was aired on Channel 4 as 'The Operation: Surgery Live', but since it was such a challenging and interesting brief I thought I'd share my ideas for it here.

The brief for the titles was this: "More of a programme identity than a sequence, and the emphasis is very much on the live action and the unpredictable nature of live surgery on TV, hence the ‘identity’ has to reflect the drama and the strength of content will do the talking."

At first I concentrated on a typographic treatment that would bring the sense of 'live', using a stylised halftone suggestive of video scan-lines.  This was easy enough as an idea, but wasn't really reflecting the strength of the content.  I was very aware of the danger of sensationalising what was a slightly controversial programme.  The producers had assured me that the show was intended and would be marketed as a serious, educational, eye-opening use of the televisual medium rather than anything voyeuristic or exploitative.  Live surgery had previously been hosted by the Wellcome Collection to a private studio audience and this was essentially a public extension of that venture.

Nevertheless, the first job of any TV title sequence is to make the audience want to watch the rest of the programme, so whatever I did had to be engaging and at least arouse curiosity.  We weren't sure at this stage whether the audience would already have been forewarned by the continuity announcer about the explicit nature of the imagery so I didn't want to be too graphic in depicting surgery.  The whole notion of curiosity and the inside of the body as a secret place influenced my thinking, and I started making some quick tests around a 'seeing through the keyhole' type of idea.

These were a step in the right direction but somehow seemed too obvious and risked looking unrecognisable and obscure.  I remembered the video Intro did for Primal Scream's Kill All Hippies, and something about it's subtractive use of negative space was stuck in my mind.  Then I realised that what I could do was flip my idea on its head, and instead of using a keyhole, I could cut out (like a surgeon...?) the explicit body parts from the footage, and leave us seeing the iconic surgeon's hands and implements working away at... something.  I was pretty sure that with the right footage we could get an eery, absorbing sense of 'Unheimlich', and as a graphical juxtaposition to something so alive and real it seemed natural to place very cold, objective and historical imagery - the iconic Gray's Anatomy illustrations.

It was a shame we didn't get the job because I thought there was real potential in these boards and was looking forward to making them move.  If anything was wrong with them I think it was simply that they really needed at least 20 seconds to work, and I think we were supposed to have 10 to 15.  The wrong kind of over-delivery, although that wasn't the reason they turned us down.  Here's what was finally broadcast instead: