1989-90 What if?

TV-AM goes round the regions the morning after the 1987 General Election including Glasgow:


Not sure whether this can be classed as "regional" output though, as I suspect they're just feeds from various OB's.

In one of the IBA Yearbooks, the bit about TVam suggests they decided that it was better to have regional input from their various studios rather than fixed regional news slots, although as you suggest, I doubt they were in any sort of place to provide the latter anyway. I think somewhere in Morning Glory it says that there was no Scottish news for several weeks because their one employee in Scotland was off sick. There was also the general point about the barely disguised loathing between TVam and many of the other regions.

I beleive that's why on the infamous Brighton bombing, all they could show was a still photo of the hotel looking pristine with John Stapleton down the line. The other companies didn't get on with them, so they couldn't use any of their footage.

This is me just quoting stuff from Morning Glory again, but they did ask TVS for footage. Greg Dyke, of all people, was Director of Programmes at the time, so they had to phone him up at 5am and he just said if they could get in the OB vehicles they could use them but don't bother him again, and it turns out they couldn't, because they were behind the police cordon. And they weren't supposed to use ITN pictures because the point of the station was that they were an alternative news provider to ITN. They did get some footage in the end, by virtually begging.

As we know, what they were supposed to have done was get footage from their own crews on the scene, but they didn't have any because they'd all gone home the day before, to save money.

Edit *Steve Williams got in before me and wrote what I pretty much wrote in more detail*

I actually think that in the case of the 1984 Brighton bombing, it was the fact that trade union rules, at the time, meant one OB crew couldn't provide cover for another OB crew at another ITV company. In addition, at the time, TV-am and ITN were in dispute, meaning ITN wouldn't provide footage to TV-am.

I remember Richard Whiteley writing about he using TVS' team to do a PTC after the bombing.