YouTube Gold

A brief behind the scenes of Thames TV at night. It’s also worth reading the description of this clip as it had been in the can for 2 years prior to transmission.

A video here supposedly of a Channel 4 closedown from 1996- anyone know if this is genuine or a mock? I don't remember there ever being a clock in the circles era, I've never seen it anywhere else.

I’m pretty sure that’s a mock. It does look quite real though.

That's what I thought, it's just the head switching noise and other VHS artifacting does look pretty convincing.

It was a mock by Paul Clark, sadly no longer with us.

https://www.tvforum.co.uk/thegallery/channel-4-clock-1996-39163

A couple of Channel 4 closedowns that are genuine though: one from Boxing Day 1992 which would have been one of the final sightings of ETP-1:



And the one from New Year's Eve/Day which has the "our next programme begins at" caption that replaced it for the first few months of 1993 until 4-tel on view was re-instated:



Interesting as well that the music on the ident is a version of fourscore, even though they'd stopped using it over their regular idents at this point. There is a version of the 1992 Christmas ident with a medieval-sounding version of the 1992-96 ident music as well though!

Stolen by someone else and passed off without credit as genuine then... I hate it when people do that.

No wonder the VHS artifacting looks convincing then seeing as he went to the effort to transfer it to VHS!

The use of that Thames logo means it can't be earlier than September 1990, but the BBC2 logo on TCF means it can't be later than February 1991, so that's a 5 month period it must date from. As the description says, it was broadcast in July 1993, so would have been in the can for at least just under 2 1/2 years, or possibly nearly 3 years before it was broadcast.

Interesting clip, wonder what it was a part of, The Late Show or something?

When you see the control room and all the other channels on monitors on testcard you realise why the ITV companies treated nighttime as they did in the early days.... it literally was the only thing on.

According to the description, it was this:

https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/acdb118c4c9d425abef5aabaa1fba142

Speaking of test cards, I've found this, not that interesting but it's pretty much the only off-air recording of the ITV version of ETP-1 that's out there (plenty of cwilliams videos with it though 🙄) rather than the Channel 4 or S4C versions:



Interesting how the tone cuts out for a bit then comes back, was that what ITV used to do?

Further to the Barrymore clip posted a few months ago. Here's something you didn't want to see...

I have vague but fond memories of My Kind of Music and have been able to see a couple of episodes recently. Nowhere could I see an opportunity to Michael to naturally transition into doing whatever the hell he did and carry on with the rest of the show as normal.