I think Tony Currie has said that on occasion it was convenient to let Grampian play out Scotland-wide stuff because they only had one BT local end circuit for contributions in each direction whereas STV had two. So that arrangement meant that both stations kept a circuit free for other uses.
Is there any video any of a roto or something similar for Scotland and/or Northern Ireland only programmes from any era including the channel 4 one
I believe that the only on-screen opt was S4C. If there was an opt out for Scotland and/or Northern Ireland it wasn't reflected on screen, so it would have just been your standard roto, just presumably with a different program in place of what went out on the network.
Happy to be proved wrong though if anybody knows any better.
I do remember seeing a Northern Irish schools programme on Channel 4 at the time... but I don't know if it was an opt (technically possible at the time, as UTV played out the ads) or if it was shown UK wide.
Presumably Grampian had its own roto/clock tape that it played out, which would've just looked like the standard presentation, so you'd have to be looking out for the opt to notice. I wonder if they even burned the clock/roto onto the programme tape and just played the whole thing as a single item.
And if I recall correctly from past conversations on this topic, Grampian, Scottish & Border always opted together for these programmes. In the previous era, the regions often altered their own school schedules independently, even wholly England-based regions.
It was all the standard ITV Schools on 4 stuff for regional opts, nothing different. In STV land, there was an on screen glitch, but if you were living in the Grampian region, would there have been an on screen glitch, moving from the network to the scottish opt out?
On the networked feed, you could normally tell when Scotland or UTV were due to opt, as there was a longer pause than normal before “next programme follows shortly” text faded up on the roto. I assume this was to give those regions/nations time to cut to their own roto sequence. The “glitch” talked about would have been the hard-switch between the networked roto and the local one. I’m not sure why they couldn’t make the switch as the previous programme ended and avoid showing the networked roto at all - maybe that was the intention but it didn’t always happen?
Agree with you. Maybe there was some sort of need for a technical signal, the network roto, so they could do the switch.
Another thing was in 1989, when the Channel 4 daily launched, requiring C4 to extend the first interval, to have a still of the clock and music until 0927:50, when the rotomotion came in, until 1992, when it was changed, for the better in my opinion, to the rotomotion device with "SCHOOLS PROGRAMMES follow shortly". If you watched carefully, there was a small glitch, as TV-am made way for the regional companies at this time, which explained the extended interval, as that was the handover from TV-am selling the airtime to the local ITV companies.
Another thing was in 1989, when the Channel 4 daily launched, requiring C4 to extend the first interval, to have a still of the clock and music until 0927:50, when the rotomotion came in, until 1992, when it was changed, for the better in my opinion, to the rotomotion device with "SCHOOLS PROGRAMMES follow shortly". If you watched carefully, there was a small glitch, as TV-am made way for the regional companies at this time, which explained the extended interval, as that was the handover from TV-am selling the airtime to the local ITV companies.
Well it didn't really matter who was providing adverts for Channel 4 during schools programming at this time because there weren't any adverts to show.
The 9:25 glitches (and 6am, and 7pm/5:15pm in London) are exaggerated when you see the videos on YouTube, its an artefact of video recording. They wouldn't have looked anywhere near that bad in real time, in fact you would have probably struggled to notice a lot of them.
Then at the start of 1993 they got rid of the interval to sell more adverts in the leadup to the start of ITV Schools, sadly! So all you got at the start was 40 seconds of the clock. Though ITV schools was already moribund by then anyway.