Some observations from someone who lived (and worked) through all of this. Channel Television was unionised like all the other ITV companies. It was simply that ACTT didn't call its members in the Channel islands out on strike. Hence, any of the fantasy scenarios suggested in the 40 pages of posts would have been blacked by ACTT straight away. Channel couldn't ever have provided a national feed because a) there was absolutely no ntechnical facility for it to do so and b) ACTT would have shut down Channel on the spot. Equally fantasies about taking sport from French TV (ahem - how????) .... ignoring the standards conversion and the fact that CTV didn;t have any usable off-air feeds; how would they have paid for such programming??
Someone asked about the schedules. Here are a few taken at random from the pages of Channel TV Times:
SATURDAY Sep 8th: 5.00pm Puffin's Birthday Gteetings 5.05 Tarzan 6.00 Animated Classics: Oliver Twist 6.50 Wind in the Wires (aviation documentary) 7.20 The New Avengers 8.20 feature Film: The Hot Rock (Robert Redford, George Segal) 10.10 The Cabot Connection 11.5 Weather & Closedown
SUNDAY Sep 9th: 5.00pm Puffin 5.05 Tarzan 6.00 Channel News and Weather 6.05 Good News (religious) 6.15 Animated Classics: Oliver Twist pt.2 7.05 Never Go With Strangers (COI type docu) 7.25 The New Avengers 8.25 Feature Film: The Andromeda Strain (Arthur Hill, Kate Reid) 10.45 Wildlife Cinema 11.10 Epilogue, Weather, Closedown
WEDNESDAY Sep 12th: 1.20pm Channel News, What's On and Weather 1.30 Close down 5.00 Puffin 5.05 Kum Kum 5.30 Dynomutt The Dog Wonder 6.00 Report at Six Extra 7.00 Asian Notebook 7.30 Emergency! 8.25 Feature Film: In The Matter Of Karen Ann Quinlan (Piper Laurie, Brian keith) 10.05 Channel Late News and Weather 10.10 The Terronauts 11.05 Actualities ei Previsions Meterorologiques (French news & weather) 11.15 Epilogue, Weather, Close down
While the strike was on, my union - Equity - wasn't in dispute so we continued to be employed. But there was nothing for me to do, so I took off for Jersey for a spell, recorded commercial voiceovers and provided a useful pair of hands. The reason I was sent up to the north of Jersey to pick up Radio Victory news and scribble it down was that Channel had an agreement with LBC to take the news. It was all above board, but there wasn't a way LBC could feed the scripts to Channel. No email, no Fax machine!!
The return to normal on 24th October would certainly have had normal CTV continuity and News. At STV we did the normal startup at 5.40pm; the only bit I changed was instead of "This is Scottish Television", I said "This IS Scottish Television"! As noted way back in this thread, STV had local continuity and commercials including in vision closedown from me.
The views expressed on this forum are entirely my own.