YTV Newsroom Hull

Yep - originally Anglia covered Hull, and Granada/ABC had the entire "North of England" franchise (there was no Yorkshire TV).

In 1968 (after a new franchise round) - and around the time that ITV UHF colour was about to launch - the North region was split up, and Anglia lost the very north of their region around Hull to the new Yorkshire TV. (I think that the re-arrangement of transmitters for UHF made the split easier?)

Through the odd quirks of transmitters, North Norfolk used to get Look North from Leeds (then Hull) well into the 90s, though Sandringham got BBC One East apparently (the Queen preferred Look East?) I think that this anomaly may have been rectified with the move to digital transmission and North Norfolk viewers now get BBC One East and Anglia TV rather than a Yorkshire region.

Granada, in its pan-North days, had a contribution studio on the Headrow on Leeds. There's some footage on one of the sites of Parky presenting something from there.

Actually Belmont (which is the transmitter than serves Lincolnshire and Humberside) carried Anglia until 1974, and then was handed to YTV, to compensate for the fact the new (in 1971) Bilsdale transmitter that carried Tyne Tees, had an embarrassingly large overlap with Emley Moor (YTV's main transmitter)



Anglia complained to the IBA after they lost Belmont, that viewers on the North Norfolk coast
were now getting the wrong ITV regional service. The coastal strip cannot receive Anglia's main transmitter at Tacolneston, but can get Belmont, which is an over the sea path. The IBA fixed the problem (in part)
by building some relay stations to provide Anglia to this area, and the BBC also provided BBC 1 East on those transmitters (because for them Belmont had always carried Northern regional programming). However for BBC 2 and C4, the viewers still had to use Belmont, which was a rather messy arrangement for them, two separate aerials were required.

It was all fixed at DSO, frequencies were found to carry the BBC SD PSB mux, and the ITV/4/5 SD mux (as well as the HD mux)

Further reading
http://tx.mb21.co.uk/features/belmont/index.shtml

It took the six year for that problem to be resloved. It was more to do with the fact the public complained to the IBA and a very high number of new ariels appeared in the area pointing south.

I don't know what I was thinking, I meant Lincoln, not York. I think I need a holiday!

Geography was never my strong point. I do, however, remember going past a Yorkshire Television building a few times when I was young (possibly as we only got Yorkshire when we went on holiday, which incidentally caused one of the infamous ident nightmares when the chevron was clearly flying out of the TV). It definitely wasn't Hull (we never went there when I was a child), but it might not have been York.


It certainly wasn't Lincoln, as I've never been.

The one in York used to have a shop underneath with loads of merchandise. It was mostly videos of ITV series (across all ITV companies) and possibly BBC series as well? And Emmerdale merchandise, rather than a range of chevron branded items which we all would have preferred.

The sign outside used to have a YTV chevron and a TTTV logo (the grey mid 90s one I think) as York is an overlap area.

The York newsroom was a bit of a political thing, I believe, opened originally by Tyne Tees as a way of being more visible in North Yorkshire when Yorkshire were doing their "turn to Yorkshire" marketing campaign.

Of course the two eventually merged and it became a joint YTTV operation.

Wow there's a childhood memory I'd completely forgotten about. Remember that shopfront very well now from a holiday I went on in the mid 90s!

For anyone interested the Sheffield office is now in the former airport (unless its moved in the last two years) with a three desk room and a down the line next door.

TV Ark have a Redvers Kyle voiced promo for the YTV shops

http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/dsplus/m.php?p=ytv_shop_promo1987.rm

Not entirely sure what the statue of liberty has got to do with it.

I would have liked a YTV momento though particularly a dusty bin.

No, they don't. Even if they did, the BBC's building at Queens Gardens would put them to shame (they occupy the lower floors, where Peter Levy's Look North and Radio Humberside are based, the upper ones are flats). Incidentally, the previous Radio Humberside premises were so poor that it remains unoccupied over a decade after the BBC moved out.