Memories of Regional Programmes

I didn't say "just" 🙂

Although I don't recall YTV or Granada ever bothering with their own farming production.

Pretty much Sunday afternoon exclusives.

Tyne Tees used to put out Farming Outlook between the local news, and "Shoot!", the football highlights programme, for many years.

"Shoot" works for both the Farming programme and the football!
There was also farming programming on some of the ILR stations in the 1970s, I imagine the IBA regarded this as a good thing that their contractors ought to be offering.

A Dover production.

Sons and Daughters was never networked. Most started showing it around 1983/84 but showed it at their own pace. Anglia and Tyne Tees had the series provided to them by Thames for its entire run so I suppose it was semi networked in these 3 regions. Almost every region showed it in the 3.30pm slot before Children's ITV. Central completed first in Dec 1988 followed by YTV in March 1989. Most others completed in the early 1990s. STV were actually the final region to complete it in Mid 1995 in an overnight slot! Unlike most other imports I think Sons and Daughters was one of the few that every ITV region showed until the final episode. With The Young Doctors, A Country Practice and even Prisoner Cell Block H, quite a few regions never completed them although most of them did get completed. STV didnt show The Young Doctors at all and UTV and Westcountry both didnt complete it. A few didnt manage to complete Prisoner either. Certainly Meridian still had over a 100 to show when they finally axed it in 1999!

HTV Wales had lots of regional programmes. Wales This Week is still going on ITV Wales to this day along with Sharp End and Coast and Country among others.

Yes, don't forget Ambridge is in the ATV/Central region

Thanks, now we know who to blame for getting EH onto our screens........if only.

I remember hearing him say that he knew absolutely nothing about farming as he was from Belfast (rather than a rural area). It helped him get the job presenting Good Evening Ulster whilst still very young which brought him to national (UK) prominence with the Open Air job whilst still only 27.

As ever, the fantastic ITV Regional Highlights website has the post-1992 regional matches covered...
http://tvset.byethost12.com/utm/itv/ITVregional90s.html

When ITV had the rights to the Football League in 1992-96, it was up to the individual regions as to how much they would cover live, Central had about a dozen clubs in the second tier in 1992 so showed a live match pretty much every week (including in 1993/94, I think the only live match on FTA TV on Boxing Day before the Beeb's on Boxing Day just gone), whereas Granada had just one, so only showed a couple - but then also did Granada Sports World on Saturday afternoons, their low-rent Grandstand knock-off which would monitor the local football in between the various imports. Between 1992 and 1996 there was a lot of it, as the site illustrates, and even Border showed a live game in 1995.

In 1996, Sky got the live rights to the Football League, but they sub-licenced some matches to Central for the 1996-97 season. They showed ten games over the season, and they all featured Midlands clubs (all but one featured a Midlands club at home) with the other regions picking up the relevant ones. That didn't carry on for the rest of that contract period, though.

Then when ITV Digital got the rights in 2001/02, there were a handful of live games in the ITV regions again. Most regions showed at least one, and it wasn't just the big regions - HTV Wales showed Cardiff vs Wrexham and even Westcountry showed Exeter vs Torquay. In fact the only major region which didn't show any live games (minus Border and Channel) was Tyne Tees, because the big three clubs in the region were all in the Premier League at the time so they could only show Darlington and Hartlepool, not much of a draw.

This was quite exciting, but once more it illustrated the failings of the ITV Sport Channel, in that so many of their major attractions were on ITV - half the Champions League, a dozen or so Football League matches and one semi-final and the final of the League Cup. It was good to get the League Cup Final and Division One Play-Off Final on FTA TV, it should probably happen every season, but it meant it was hardly worth getting ITV Sport as ITV were offering enough for the casual fan.

That illustrates the flaw of ITV running both a channel that wanted to get enormous audiences to pull in advertising revenue and one that also needed to have exclusive content to drum up subscriptions (and also wasn't on Sky so they felt they had to offer some content to a wider audience). It meant that anything of any interest on ITV Sport was nabbed by ITV. It was supposed to be the case that ITV had Wednesday night Champions League matches and ITV Sport exclusive rights to Tuesdays, but the second Liverpool vs Barcelona and Man U vs Bayern came out on the Tuesday, ITV nicked it. Good for the viewers, useless for subscribers.

This also recalls the results programme Granada ran from the late 1980s, until about 1997, Granada Goals extra. I know Central ran a similar programme, what abuot other ITV regions?

On Saturday morning I was watching ITV4 and an old episode of the Big Match from April 1975 The second match on was Luton Town against Man City and Brian Moore said it was covered by Anglia. I am puzzled by how Luton could be in the Anglia region?

G

Quite easily, I'd have thought, Luton is on the overlap of two regions. Much like how Granada used to sometimes go to Wrexham.

With umpteen other clubs in their patch, Luton wasn't always top priority for LWT, so Anglia were happy enough to cover them as well. In fact in the 1983 series of The Big Match Revisited, Luton are featured in successive weeks, one week covered by LWT and the next by Anglia.

This reminds me, there's a "new" series of The Big Match Revisited on ITV4 next week featuring 1979/80, I should start a thread about that.