New Radio Times regions?

Yes they did - but as I said before the English regional editions I think were primarily to cover radio variations, rather than television variations which in the 1970s and 1980s amounted to regional news and two other half hour slots during the week. With one BBC Local Radio station per edition, this meant that in the 1970s there were over 30 regional editions of Radio Times! And in the days before BBC Local Radio there were regional variations in the Home Service.


Heresy!


Just a reduction in the number of stations per edition would be nice!

No,it's in the Radio Times.

For those of you old enough to remember you will know that the Radio Times used to have features on Local Radio in every edition. It was called Yours Locally ... indeed there was a jingle that LR stations ran to promote what was in it each week which went "Yours Locally in Radio Times the locals paper". When I was on Radio Devon I was actually featured in it a couple of times - the first when I was doing my exams and doing a show - the photographer thought it would be fun to have a pile of records in one hand and a pile of text books in the other - god I got the p**s taken out of me at college for that. The second was when my programme was the first to play all it's music off CD (I know that sounds hard to believe these days with servers/MP3s etc). It was just Radio Devon/Cornwall and CI's in those days in the South West edition.

Had a quick flick in this week's new edition & BBC (Radio) London at least has disappeared from the Midlands edition!

The London/Anglia edition has kept it's eclectic range of local radio listings, covering everywhere from The Channel Islands and Lands End to The Wash. Although in these days of the BBC Radio Player it's pretty academic what listings they include

One oddity is that on BBC1 they include Look East, BBC London News and South East Today, in the main listings but don't mention Meridian in ITV1's.

Also have they stoped the practise of dividing a column into 2?

No, the Wales edition splits a column between BBC2 Analogue and BBC2W where necesssary.

But it has to be said that it's easier to read without the complication of West's analogue as well.

With grateful thanks to a member of the Llandaffia, I now have a Wales edition in addition to my West one; and I have to say that the Wales one is far better.

That's still true that there's no listing for TG4 in the Radio Times and TV Times

Those of us who subscribe to the former West/Wales edition of RT were sent BOTH editions this week. There was a note inside saying to call them or receive the Wales edition from next week.
How's that for service!?

Has anyone told the Radio Times and TV Times that the Northern Ireland region of the ITV1 network is called UTV???

In the Radio Times its listed as "ITV1 ULSTER". The TV Times (saw a copy today) calls it simply "ITV".

MediaGuardian reports today that a new RadioTimes branded 7-day EPG will soon be available on Digital TV.

Just a quick overview of Radio Times "editions".

When it began in 1923 there was just one edition.
From 1928 there were two - Southern and Northern
In 1933 it was back to one edtition again
In 1936 a TV Edition circulated in London (with a gravure TV Supplement for the duration of 1937) - other areas didn't have TV programmes included.
When the war broke out it was back to a single edition at first, but later a French Edition was produced, (Badged BEF Edition) and later an AEF Edition appeared....and that was it until 1946
when - mainly due to paper shortage - the paper was regionalised with editions for
London
London Television
Midlands
North
West
Welsh
North of England and Northern Ireland (they had to share a wavelength for the Home Service so they shared an edtion of RT as well)
Scottish


In 1949 the North of England edition was separated from Northern Ireland, who had their own edition. But for a year or two it didn't have an edition name, so that it could also be distributed in north-east England.

In 1953 The Television Edition was dropped and TV programmes included in all editions for the first time.

In 1960 the Midlands Edition was renamed Midlands & East Anglia, and the West of England Edition was renamed South and West

In 1963 the previously unmarked London Edition was renamed London & South East

When BBC-2 began, there were a number of "BBC-2" editions for areas where only certain parts of a region could get BBC-2.

In 1969 lots of new regional editions were created to match the new pattern of local TV news. The basic editions were:

London and South-east
Midlands East
Midlands West
East
South
South-West
West
Wales
North East
North West
Cumberland and Westmorland
Scottish
Northern Ireland

But most English regions then split into local radio editions.

During printing disputes all of the English editions would often appear simply as the "England" Edition

From this point onwards it becomes about as exciting as reading the ingredients on a Worcestershire Sauce bottle, but things changed next when Radio Times started carrying ITV and C4 listings - to begin with they mirrored the ITV regions, so the RT editions were

London and South East
Midlands
East Anglia
South
South West
Wales
North West
Yorkshire
North East
Border
Scottish
Grampian
Northern Ireland

The Border and Grampian editions fell quickly by the wayside and Wales was merged with West.

By the way, the current list given earlier in this thread isn't quite complete - there's also an NTL Edition.

(Shameless plug: more of this kind of nonsense with loads of pictures in my book "The Radio Times Story".)