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Yes, I did think of that, but wasn’t aware if there were a lot of people whose first language was French (hence the news bulletin).

Aren't there lots of Portuguese speakers on Jersey, I'm sure Channel had a Portuguese language programme at one point

I believe they did. It was a five minute update on Sundays.

Son of Plain Advertising Man's Guide to Tyne Tees Television



https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-son-of-plain-advertising-mans-guide-to-tyne-tees-television-1964-online

Here's a bit of a novelty. Sir Neil Miles, of this parish, in among his recent fascinating uploads, has put up the Grandstand Final Score sequence from Saturday 21st March 1987...



And also on YouTube is the ITV Results Service from the same day!



Interesting to see them both to make direct comparisons, unless you're a Villa fan, seemingly. Perhaps someone would like to run them in parallel to see who gets most of the results in first. It does add further evidence to the theory, as I mentioned here a few weeks ago, that in 65 years of broadcasing ITV have never found an attractive colour combination to present the football results. Elton Welsby's a bit at sea, repeatedly unable to pronounce "Dundee United" (and "the tuntry's top scorers"), and a world away from Des' relaxed approach. Watch out for Des discussing the fish mallet.

Some interesting reporters in both, with Newsbeat presenter turned one of Sky News' first anchors Frank Partridge at Norwich, while at Dundee U-knotted for ITV is Richard Park, then at Radio Clyde but later Fame Academy judge and now in charge of pretty much all commercial radio in Britain.

Of course as with all old football coverage, there's an incredible obsession with the pools, sometimes giving over the impression the matches exist for the benefit of the pools rather than the other way round. I read in When Saturday Comes a while back that no activity has fallen out of favour in recent years more than doing the pools, even smoking and churchgoing, as it used to be that absolutely everyone did the pools, and now nobody does it. I was always baffled by the whole thing, although I always enjoyed watching the score draw ticker change on the teleprinter.

One of the other oddities on Grandstand is the rugby results, with its massive list of matches rather than any specific leagues, because this was still the era when rugby was strictly amateur and having a league would have been at odds with the whole ethos of playing for the sake of playing, and clubs would just organise matches between themselves, but they did have the Merit Table where certain matches would be selected to count for positions in it. All very confusing.

The football pools dropped out of fashion when the lottery came along, as IIRC it was relatively complicated to work out whether you won anything on the pools or not, whereas with the lottery it was just "have I got three or more numbers? Yes, happy days". I think the pools was flogged off to somebody a few years ago and I presume its still going, but the "classic" form is long gone.

There used to be three different Pools companies. Littlewoods, Vernons, and Zetters. In 2007 Sportech bought all three and relaunched them as The Football Pools, and in 2017 it was sold to OpCapita.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pools

The good old days of the vidiprinter, I wonder how many viewers these days would sit and watch it filling the screen for 10 or so minutes? Love the buzzing sound it makes as it's typing out as well.

I think towards the dying days of it being used it was only shown across the bottom of the screen rather than filling it.

Well it's still going in a similar form, but yes I'd forgotten it used to be full screen. As for people sitting there staring at a screen waiting for results to come in - people certainly still do that, just with a different type of screen.

Yes, that's the era I recall of it.

I remember being fascinated by the technology behind it - my Dad would tell me that in the past they just had a camera pointed at a paper output from a Telex(?) printer, seemed ridiculous to me even as a 7 year old.

Is somebody somewhere typing those results in? The speed seems a bit variable for it to be entirely CG.

There was a bit of smoke and mirrors, because the Beeb got the feed from the Press Association, and they would then retype it without all the extraneous stuff they didn't want.

It is remarkable how few matches they're actually at between them - both the Beeb and ITV are at Watford (Martin Tyler postponing his honeymoon to go there), the Beeb are at Norwich and ITV are at Everton, plus ITV also have someone at an SPL match, but that's it for reporters and everything else you just have to rely on Des or Elton telling you. The idea now is that the Premier League dominates but on the Beeb and Sky now you have every Premier League match covered, a reporter at every Championship game and a couple from the lower leagues, whereas in those days even the lower reaches of the top flight wouldn't be covered in any particular depth. No regular Saturday night highlights in this period, neither.

Doesn't seem that ridiculous really, seems like a fairly logical way to do it in the days before you could do it electronically.