ITV wants to axe some regional news services

I'm sure that TSW would play their montage film of the south west, that began and ended with a shot of the Caradon Hill mast. I'm not sure I remember any mention of the IBA, and certainly no' Transmitters in Service' caption though, so as you say, not a formal IBA start up..

Shouldn't that technically be 'just in case the schools feed from Central fell over and you had to apologise'.

Tyne Tees did continue with the authority announcement for quite a while (it wasn't until February 1988 that it was finally replaced with a more flexible good morning message, and even then Neville Wanless continued with it until his semi-retirement around June of that year). But they had dispensed with the formal startup as such, and replaced it with a CA-read news bulletin. Plenty of clips exist around the interweb.

I believe TTTV did it purely out of a sense of tradition, as there was no compunction for them to do so. I'm pretty sure it was Wanless's stamp on things, as he was the head of the department at the time.

ISTR that YTV's approach was an inordinately large amount of trailers and programme rundowns to fill the gap.

Yes, it would have been coming down from Central by then, not that that ever stopped them putting the "BATV" colour bars on the front of it, though.

How to confuse the innocents at the other end, by a man in Birmingham!

The Border startup was also continued until quite late-on in the 80s, voiced by Allan Cartner. From what I remember his voiceover was done over a still of the "BORDER TELEVISION" ident, then there was music, then a run-down and trailers until schools programmes started at 0930. It ended around the time that the ITV daytime schedule was introduced (September 1987).

The classic startup delivered by Allan was:

"This is Border Television, broadcasting to Cumbria, South Scotland, the Isle of Man and north and west Northumberland, from the Caldbeck, Selkirk and associated transmitters of the Independent Broadcasting Authority."

STV played the last 20 seconds or so of Scotlandia when they came on the air at 0925 then made their authority announcement until their major revamp in August 1985 - the time the thistle logo was introduced and the on-air name became Scottish Television.

After that, they ran an ident at 0925 followed by the authority announcement. Indeed they continued with an authority announcement, presumably out of a sense of tradition, right up until the IBA was abolished.

I remember even up to 1999 there have a slightly longer ident for the start up

I loved ITV's regional identity, shame that's it's all in the past and merging regions even more is ridicolous. What's next ITV 1 England?

Isn't that what we've got already effectively? Does anyone think a few minutes of local news gives a service a regional identity? The rot started when they stopped making programmes regionally, stopped basing programme scheduling in the region, and stopped broadcasting from the region they were based in. That started in 1992... It's been downhill in identity terms since then.

Of course there is a very strong argument that regional identity doesn't make a profit - and ITV doesn't exist to serve us, it exists to serve its shareholders... It isn't a charity, it is a business... The licence to print money expired a while ago I guess.

that was STV person Lord :

but by late 60;s it was in Debt, and now has gone full circular as its still in Debt ! Nearly bankrupts !

Though of course if OFCOM stood up to ITV and told them they'd lose their broadcast licence if they failed to deliver the regional service, they'd have to serve us to be able to serve the shareholders.


I've said this several times before - but the solution IMO is to let ITV run the "network" service, but just like GMTV is a seperate franchise to provide the breakfast programme, resell the franchises to provide the regional content - all the regional news plus a quota of regional programming per week, with ITV having to estabhlish fixed slots. I'd say 6-7pm on Sunday, 11pm-midnight one day during the week.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would still operate under the existing system, where technically the "regional" franchisee would also control the "network" output, so have more flexibility in scheduling etc.

didn;t there stop this back in 1990?