UTV - From City Quays 2 onwards

Didn't Utv use granada cat and lnn neno dancers?

UTV took Granada's Night Time service from 1988, which then yielded to the LNN feed in 1995. IIRC, the clean feed provided to STV/UTV came in at the time of the ITV1 rebrand in November 2004.

The only bomb scare which affected UTV I recall seeing on screen was in late 1992 - the programmes played out from their sources without adverts - I can't remember seeing a VT clock in this instance, although I remember a programme menu being displayed during the slot for the late regional news. At the end of this slot, there was a brief switch to Border as their bulletin ended, then an ad break, with a UTV programme menu appearing at the end of the junction, with an announcement mentioning the security alert.

I can remember watching clean itv feed on utv in 2004/5 and 2006.

They would have an 80's Back Soon sign with funky 80's music in the adverts.

This one?


I seem to remember that by the early 2000s it had changed to something like this:



except in UTV land it had the same music as previously.

That's it! It was very 80's. I can actually recall the first time I seen itv feed on utv. It was when itv brought back Crossroads for a 2003 reboot and they had cheesy title music for it.

Yet I can't remember what I did yesterday

I remember the neon dancers and their catchy tune from watching some of the 80's and 90's US TV shows that UTV were showing around midnight/1am on Friday nights in the mid-90's. It was always a still image but I'm pretty sure there's an actual video of two neon characters actually dancing around. Was there a reason why it was always a still image and not a video?

There were animated idents with the dancers, they went out on the overnight service (the one UTV took, anyway) up until November 1999. Thereafter the already formed up version of the generic ITV ident was used (though the “lines” version started to be used on weekdays after the change to ITV1).

Despite how 80s the dancers looked, afaik they only were used between 1995-99.

The neon dancers of the 1990s was part of "Television with Attitude":

UTV as I recall started taking the Granada NT service a week or two after the other small companies, and so for a short while was the only company that closed down at 12:30 or so. Was there a reason for this -- was it technical or something to do with contracts?

I believe the month-long delay between Tyne Tees/Border/TSW/Grampian, and then UTV, taking up Night Time was due to resolving issues with the IBA.

There may also have been talks with the various unions to avoid a repeat of events in 1987 where management at Havelock House were left to run the station for two weeks after unofficial strike action.

It was a month later for utv.

Indeed, I found the Wiki page after posting which goes into some detail. I remembered it being "a couple of weeks" from noticing it at the time.