40th anniversary of the ITV strike

I've been following the ITV On Strike Twitter account, and it's absolutely fascinating.

I wasn't born until 1985, but TV history fascinates me, and this is a brilliant place to start, I reckon.

I was vaguely aware of the strike before this week, but I knew next to nothing about it. I've really enjoyed reading about it.

The Channel thing is interesting, I can see that the unions got it, they knew that strike action there would kill the channel and mean people would definitely lose jobs. That's how it's coming across to me, anyway.

Oh, same. I was born in 2003 and still it’s fascinating.

Thames Television probably watched Channel Television and saw how a management run service could be provided in the future, if union laws were amended.

In 1984 Thames Television would provide their own management run service of import and repeats when their unions went on strike, and Thames managed to keep their region on air during the strike of 1984.

The 1984 Thames strike saw TV-am on air from 6.25am until 9.25am, and then viewers in the Thames region had nothing until around 1.30pm, when Thames would start their own management run schedule until around midnight, with nothing provided from the network, including no news from ITN.

The management run service worked, and the unions were forced into a retreat.

I have to ask if Gyngell had this in mind?

ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN2p7YXKj_M

For TV-am?

Yes.

Bruce was forced to provide a management run schedule in 1987/1988 when he locked out his staff when they walked out on a one day strike, hoping to return. They were not planning an all out strike like Thames had to deal with in 1984. However yes, the run of imports and repeats are the basic diet for a management run emergency service.

I do wonder if it provided some kind of inspiration or template.

The TV-am lock out schedule for the first couple of weeks was simply live links by a presenter to either short news summaries, repeats of interviews they did from their TV-am archive and of course the main diet of imported material of Happy Days, Batman and Flipper.


However towards Christmas 1987 they managed to do what Thames Television didn't really do, and bring a full live, management run shorter edition of their morning magazine programme Good Morning Britain, at first a 30 minute edition, later extended to a one hour edition, with the remaining hours padded out with repeats and imports.

I have a feeling with time, the management grew in confidence, and increased the amount of live programming they could do in their management run service, with less reliance on Happy Days, Batman etc - Thames had to stick mostly with repeats and imports, I am not sure if Thames News ran a full programme during the 1984 strike.

According to Morning Glory part of the management run GMB was a half hour interview with Anne Diamond.

Anne took maternity leave - perhaps more than once - and I recall her visiting the studio with one of her sons, Oliver, shortly after his birth. Perhaps this appearance, in her status as “guest”, is what is being referred to.

Didn't there do live week from down under and disneyland awell?