What was your favorite regional ITV station growing up?

Most of the activity the studio there got was during the miner's strike of 84/85, and down the line interviews for Calendar and ITN of Arthur Scargill. A YTV engineer joked to me once that Scargill's face became burnt into the camera's pick up tubes he was sat in front of it so often.

I think a lot of ITV companies were guilty of that, covering only the main area where they were based, on their news programmes, and giving other areas lip service. Tyne Tees, under Yorkshire control, did try to alleviate that with network North, though according to Transdiffusion, the original plan was for the programme to be broadcast to the south of the Tyne Tees region, and the North of the Yorkshire region.

I’m sure that’s true - the generic name of the programme (not mentioning TTT) does seem to suggest that. I wonder which YTV transmitters were planned to be included - I assume those covering North Yorkshire - and why this ultimately did not go ahead?

Were there any non-relay YTV transmitters covering North Yorkshire anyway? Wouldn't they have had to reconfigure some of the relays to get Network North on them?

I remember going to Euston Road in 1991, and getting my Mum a Thames TV shopping bag. It's in the loft now at my parents so when lock down is over I'll snap it for here.

Well, none ! Sounds like a urban myth of an idea. Emley was YTV, next tx was Bilsdale, nothing in between, and only a handful of relays anyway. As ever the mb21 site is everyone's friend

Most of North Yorkshire can already get a strong signal from Bilsdale, but most people, especially in the southern part of the county, prefer to watch Yorkshire programmes from Emley.

I’m not sure exactly what the plan was for Network North - perhaps they expected people to turn their aerials around towards Bilsdale. It seemed like an ill-conceived idea from what I can tell. Places like York have a much closer affinity to Leeds than to Middlesbrough.

I suspect that this idea stemmed from the fact that the local press referenced the local news from both companies as "Calendar/Network North", and "Tyne Tees Today/Network North" for over a year after the service started. This must have come from YTTV itself as they were all saying the same thing.

Network North was primarily staffed by YTV executives and technical staff. Employees at the old Middlesbrough office had largely been made redundant in November 1992, and the existing facility to split the news coverage was physically ripped out from City Road around that time so Bilsdale had no separate coverage for around five months. Tyne Tees had very little to do with the service's launch.

Having moved from Gloucestershire to Yorkshire in the mid 90s, I remember being amazed that Network North’s set was an almost exact replica of Central News South’s at the time. Obviously nowadays matching sets are the norm, but I’d be interested to know how that came about. Was CNS’s the original design or had they both copied a set from abroad perhaps?

According to transdiffusion, there were various stories coming out, about why Network North was created. One idea was that Yorkshire wanted to turn the Tyne Tees and Yorkshire areas into one super franchise area. Whether that's true or not, I have no idea.

Well it's a matter of public record that YTV wanted to sell off City Road and move to a facility much like that at Billingham.

Just how good was Network North?