ITV & the Olympics

The other two European PSBs that used to share big ticket sports events jointly were Germany's ZDF and ARD. They never simulcast anything, either one or the other I think ? Because of that they'd often also share on site tech facilities and studios too.

I've got a feeling that government broadcasting legislation required that manner of sharing ?

Don't ARD and ZDF do alternate days?

Something like that I think ?

Now I know how Thames and LWT must have felt about Christmas Day

I've not checked this on Wiki, but in 1984 didn't ITV, heavily promote, and show the sci/fi programme V against the nightly BBC Olympic coverage? Also would this be one of the first series to be stripped nightly across the week? Again 36 years is a long time ago and my memory could be playing tricks with me.

G

They did indeed show V during the Olympics, and it's often been referred to as their replacement for the coverage, but I think the ITV coverage would have been a bit like 1972 with much shorter programmes than the Beeb, so I think they were always going to show V regardless.

ITV did strip a few mammoth American mini-series over a couple of nights in the early eighties, things like The Winds at War which was a big show at the time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winds_of_War_(miniseries) - would be shown twice or three times a week over two or three weeks.

Am I right in thinking ITV never touched the Winter Olympics.

No, but they did cover winter sports on World of Sport, and at the height of Torvill and Dean's success they did a lot with figure skating, covering the World and European Championships and so on alongside the Beeb. Barry Davies writes about this in his book, the Beeb were used to covering them alone before ITV turned up, and they lavished quite a lot of attention on them, as the Beeb would generally link it all out of vision with Barry filming any in-vision links all in one go at the start at the event, but ITV brought a whole outside broadcast unit and linked it all live on site, meaning on one day Barry was introducing the event on the Beeb in bright sunshine, while Nick Owen was on ITV in the middle of a blizzard.

Barry says that ITV massively overhyped some of the skaters that followed Torvill and Dean and suggests that Karen Barber and Nicky Slater, particularly, were a bit overwhelmed by it all and it dented their confidence a bit. And when the UK stopped winning so much, ITV stopped.

As an aside to that I wonder what would have happened had either Birmingham would the Olympic bid in 92 or either of Manchester's bids had won because if I remember correctly Granada was supposed to be the IBC for the Manchester bids.

Granada would not have been able to provide an 'IBC' with their then existing facilities.

With the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer the IBC was a purpose built facility. After those games part it was repurposed as NRK's regional centre for the area, (the remainder became a college)

The NRK part had a couple of studios, that they used for the games, and these were retained . However the vast bulk of the IBC equipment was only a rig for the event, and all ripped out again.

A similar thing may well have happened in Manchester

Ah I may have misread or misunderstood what I've seen before then. Wonder if ITV would have helped out broadcasting the Olympic s in those circumstances or whether there would have been a similar setup to the 02 Commonwealth games.

Yes, perhaps Granada would have got a new set of studios as a legacy of the games, but no doubt their existing facilities wouldn't have been sufficient - plus they'd have been out of use for the best part of a year too in order to prepare.

Here's a clip of ITV/Channel 4's Olympic coverage from 1988. It seems to be coverage of the Opening Ceremony, without actually showing much of the ceremony itself!



Typical ITV reliance on human interest stories and relatives of the athletes.