BERTIE Bassett's sudden TV demise this morning is not expected to pass without critical comment from regular viewers. The two men responsible for Bertie's overnight exit from Scottish television screens, Enzo Facchini and Mike Prince, are sanguine about the inevitability of a bit of a stooshie.

''We're sure some folk won't recognise the channel for the first few days,'' says Prince. ''We're anticipating that, from 9.30 onwards, there'll be floods of phone calls from folk saying that there's something gone wrong with their telly - 'Where have Scottish and Grampian disappeared to? What's happened to Bertie?' ''

Charged with following their successful styling of Scottish digital channel S2 by updating the generic look of independent TV north of the Border, Scottish Television's design duo of Facchini and Prince have grasped the nettle and bade farewell to Scottish Television's well-kent thistle logo, fashioned as if

from Bertie ''Blockhead'' Bassett's liquorice sweeties.

In its stead is a far more sophisticated and modern-looking exercise in on-screen branding, one that's based on a simple premise: people - or, to be more precise, the faces of some of the real-life people who constitute independent TV's Scottish audience.

''We didn't want to be lumbered with a logo or an emblem that's not contemporary,'' says Prince, a TV producer-director who originally trained in graphic design. ''Nor did we want something as soulless and corporate as the BBC's floating hot-air balloon,'' adds Facchini, Scottish Television's head of creative services.

More importantly, rather than farming the work out to a design company in London - as happened with the birth of Bertie Bassett in the early eighties - it was decided to utilise native talent, beginning with Scottish Television's in-house graphic designer, Gary Harper. Likewise, the new logo for Scottish and Grampian was created by Iso, a young company based at Glasgow's Film and Video Workshop. The logo's accompanying musical signature came from another emergent Glasgow company, Savalas.

Scottish photographer David Eustace was a natural for capturing the human faces at the heart of the project, having established a worldwide reputation over the past decade with his fashion spreads and celebrity portraits for the world's top magazines.

''David was very much our third eye when it came to creating our concept's look,'' says Facchini. ''He and Mike worked together at bringing David's stills to life as moving images - with a sense of narrative to them despite their brevity - something that David had never done before. They were greatly assisted by one crucial member of David's Glasgow-based creative team, Seamus McGarvey, a young Irish cinematographer fresh from working on The Big Tease, The Slab Boys, and Paul McCartney's most recent pop promo videos.

''Using some of David's established contacts, we filmed folk in Brora; on oil rigs in the Cromarty Firth; in Stornoway, Ullapool, Glencoe; and on a beach on Harris. The BBC had already hijacked the Forth Railway Bridge and Eilean Donan castle, but we got Dunnottar castle. We've filmed a cook, a waitress, a horse-rider, sheepdogs, three spry elderly gents from Breenish, a tweed-maker who supplies Savile Row, and a couple at a tea dance in Pollokshaws.

''The point was to create Scottish images that Scottish viewers can identify with, but without those images being too regional, or too stereotypical - bagpipers and Sauchiehall Street.''

Along with Sauchiehall Street, images of urban Glasgow will, in fact, be largely absent from the first wave of what, in terms of televisual grammar, are known as i-dents and break bumpers (the former precede programmes and generally last 10 seconds; the latter are about a second in duration and separate a programme from the adverts surrounding it). ''This is an ongoing project,'' says Facchini. ''In the near-future we'll be filming folk in urban settings: Glasgow cab drivers, say, or people in theatre-land, or youths in city centres.''

But whether it's colourful balloons drifting slowly over scenic landscapes or sonsy Scottish faces, pesky critics might say that what most properly identifies any TV channel is not so much the bits between the programmes as the quality of the programmes themselves. Don't corporate rebrands misuse resources that might be better spent on programme origination?

It's not that simple an equation, says Facchini: ''You can create and sustain a new look for two years for much, much less than it

would take to make two years' worth of programming.

''More importantly, though, there are now so many TV channels available to people that every station has to be readily, instantly identifiable and uniquely distinctive at first glance.'' The cheapest way of doing this is by recourse to another item of on-screen TV

syntax, the corner bug.

Corner bug? If you're a cable or satellite telly viewer, you'll already have seen plenty of corner bugs without having consciously noticed them. For the corner bug is to be found - not unnaturally - in the top corner of the TV screen. Of the

terrestrial channels, Channel 5 has a corner bug which consists of a numeral, five, inside a circle.

Facchini and Prince have already explored the corner bug route with S2, however. Moreover, their brief for the rebranding of Scottish and Grampian was always much more wide-reaching. Eventually it will extend all the way through the corporate structure to appear on headed company stationery, while it has led to concrete changes on news flagship Scotland Today, which has ditched its virtual-reality set for a real one.

The final word belongs to Mike Prince. ''We filmed on our locations at the tail-end of the autumn, just before the weather broke. We, therefore, don't show many BBC-style blue skies, but we do show Scotland as it really is: dramatic, moody, rain-lashed, atmospheric.''

n A special edition of Scottish Television's Artery will tell the behind-the-scenes story of Scottish independent television's rebrand next Thursday, March 9, at 7.30pm.