Also worth considering that in the early days of stereo many broadcasters ran in M/S rather than L/R for both production and recording - so the recordings could have Mono Sum and Stereo Difference tracks.
Here's a 2 minute extract from the start of the show:
Thanks - I have the BBC Four HD off-air transport stream on my laptop. When I get a chance to actually play it and run it through some stereo waveform monitoring stuff I'll report back.
Well pulling the 128k MP3 into DaVinci Resolve with the free Izotope Audio Imager plugin (which gives you a nice Lissajous stereo image monitor, and lets you wind the width up and down) confirms there is something 'stereo' there (not that we needed this - our ears told us that)...
When you wind the width to zero you get a nice mono straight vertical line and it all goes very 'mono', when you run in 'normal' mode it all makes sense as stereo - but like others have commented, it sounds a bit 'phasey' - so who knows... The junctions between studio and VT are quite sledgehammer-ish, so it could well be an early-ish stereo experiment I guess.
The old engineering pages on both Ceefax and Oracle are a goldmine for info on when various regions had access to NICAM on the transmitters, although it doesn't reveal much about when/what programmes were actually going out in stereo. I can give out some details for Tyne Tees at least - via the set of pages already on TV Whirl for October 1990 they refer to NICAM as coming on to Pontop Pike from October 1990 and Bilsdale from December 1990. Although given Tyne Tees' general shoestring investment in tech, the transmitters being enabled probably doesn't mean the station were actually broadcasting anything.
Tyne Tees were advertising programmes as being broadcast in stereo in early 1991 (I think from around Christmas 1990 in fact) -- they had the NS logo bottom right of the static ident from that period. However I'm pretty sure the commercials/trailers/idents were in mono until the start of 1992 (I bought a stereo TV in around June 1991 and everything was mono in pres until at least the end of the year).
During 1991 you could tell when a programme was going to be in stereo as there was no mixing of the announcer audio into the programme; they'd always fade to black from an ident, presumably for similar technical reasons as the later ARC change junctions in the late 1990s. The sound quality on the idents and promos also had a noticeable uptick when they upgraded their playback of these to stereo in 1992; previously there was a quite pronounced hiss/buzz on these (which continued on the still-mono commercial playout until YTV took over in 1993).
Tyne Tees were advertising programmes as being broadcast in stereo in early 1991 (I think from around Christmas 1990 in fact) -- they had the NS logo bottom right of the static ident from that period..
Sounds about right.
This IBA booklet from 1990 gives NICAM from Pontop as a target date of Oct 1990, and Bilsdale as Dec 1990
At the Beeb, there was a summer period where Children's BBC was presented from "The Boiler Room" which was actually the continuity for NC3 (aka sub control, the spare continuity suite) standing in front of the monitor stack rather than at the desk. This was because NC1 was being reengineered for stereo. Until this point I believe there was a kludge involving a separate sound desk in CAR for the stereo audio.
Does anybody have more info about NICAM for CBBC and CITV? What were the very first programmes in NICAM? Were some programmes (cartoons?) in NICAM before the continuity was?
I'm going to put in a guess that one if the first programmes to be broadcast in NICAM would by Top of the Pops, because it was already being produced in stereo for the Radio 1 simultaneous broadcast.
Presumably therefore at least one studio had had its sound gallery updated with a stereo mixer.
Incidentally I've been back to my source on the bodge mentioned above (EngInf newsletters) - when NC 1 was first upgraded for stereo it could handle stereo pre records played out from a specific VT area. Live programmes had to be handled by a separate sound mixer, which for some reason was in the Spur. At this time only Crystal Palace was transmitting NICAM though.
I'm going to put in a guess that one if the first programmes to be broadcast in NICAM would by Top of the Pops, because it was already being produced in stereo for the Radio 1 simultaneous broadcast.
Presumably therefore at least one studio had had its sound gallery updated with a stereo mixer.
Don't know if you missed my post a few pages back, there's a Vevo upload of a TOTP performance from earlier in 1988 that's in stereo (before the 1FM simulcast began) and noggin suggested that it was probably in stereo near enough from the start of the Crystal Palace tests.
What is interesting from the old EngInfs is that some of the early tests were from Wenvoe to see how its long chains of relays coped with rebroadcasting stereo.
On the question of Children's programmes, I wouldn't bet against Blue Peter being one of the first. They used different studios for each show depending on what was available and what their content required, so if they happened to be in a stereo capable studio I wouldn't rule out the show going out in stereo - even if it was just a bit of mic panning.
These images from MB21 show BBC Engineering's information from Ceefax detailing when transmitters would start broadcasting NICAM - the rollout started in August 1991 and was not complete until the end of 2002!:
On the question of Children's programmes, I wouldn't bet against Blue Peter being one of the first.
That's an educated guess. Any ideas about externally produced programmes? I am aware that some 1980s cartoons were produced in stereo and broadcast in stereo on satellite and cable channels in the 1990s.