25 years since ITV Schools ended.

All I can think about is the "Back to School Mr. Bean" episode now, where the paper sticks to him and he can't get it off.

The really strange thing is his original post said "plasma ball", then when it was pointed out he changed it to Van De Graaff generator, then after making his "whoosh" post he changed it back to plasma ball again. He got it wrong, edited it to make it right, then somehow decided to act as if saying "plasma ball" was a "joke", even though the "joke" makes no sense?

I certainly remember seeing glimpses of presentation elsewhere. My total exposure to S4C Analogue amounts to however many weeks I was there as a child - mostly during the Summer though (when there wouldn't have been any Schools programming).


Makes sense for schools in that case, doesn't explain why they used it for other live simulcasts though.

We had those big Panasonic sets with the 6 preset buttons (normally labelled BBC1,2,3 and ITV1,2 and *) but I don't remember them ever holding their tuning from one lesson to the next. So every time the telly was wheeled in and the aerial lead plugged in there was then endless faffing to try and get it tuned in to ITV or BBC1 by the middle aged and not very technically proficient teacher. And that was nothing compared with the faffing that took place when we were meant to watch a video.


Of course it was normally me who helped the teacher twiddle the thumbwheels, Odd that a decade or so later I was on the other side putting the programmes on air. I wonder if the primary school kids of today have the same experience with their interactive whiteboards?

Did anybody regularly watch schools programmes outside of school or did you only watch them at school?

At least 1 teacher in my primary school hated the class singing along to Just a Minute and would turn the volume down until the programme started!



My teachers still had trouble with the clunky buttons well into the 90s. Always seemed to press every single button apart from the right one. In fact one time a teacher thought a programme was airing on Channel 4 when it was actually BBC2. Cue a class of 10 year olds tittering away at the 10 seconds or so we saw of Living and Growing!

I assume S4C received the same feed of Channel 4 as the ITV regions did (everything bar ads). As to why, perhaps it wasn’t considered cost-effective to send out a separate clean feed purely for them to record a few shows down the line, and take a few live.

If they were following a common schedule 75% or so of the time, things may have been different. I assume programmes that were in the can early enough were sent to S4C on tape - or a line booked to feed these to them to record - and late productions recorded from the dirty feed. I remember topical programmes like The Friday Alternative were delivered to Channel 4 only an hour or so before broadcast, and on one occasion the programme got lost in transit and had to be shown the following afternoon instead.

I'd imagine it was a financial consideration - a line from Bristol to Cardiff being considerably cheaper than a separate line from London to Cardiff. I don't imagine S4C has ever had much in the way of spare cash flowing about, and as we have said here before, vision circuits back in the 80/90s were very very expensive.

I was the same at the junior school, operating the Philips N1500 video recorder, leaving class to go and start a radio recording, operating the overhead projector and tape player in assembly, and so forth. That would have been up to 1977, and 41 years later still working in an industry with kit descended from that!

I only watched them at school, and at my primary school (1969 to 75), we only watched BBC school programmes.
Possibly because until 1972, the school only had a single 405 line telly, and only a Band I 'X' aerial
looking at Crystal P. Radio schools programmes were far more common, we had 'Music and Movement' on Radio 4 daily. The FM tuner was in the headmaster's office, and the audio from it was distributed to the six classrooms on a 100 volt line system.

At secondary school (75-80) there was an N1500 Philips VCR. We never watched any programmes live,
and I recall most programmes we did watch were not schools progs. BBC Horizon, and ATV's John Pilger
docs stick in my mind.

The N1500 was terrible, if you had sound and vision at the same time from it, it was mere co-incidence !

At primary school, which was early 90s, we had one TV, one of those massive things on a trolley with the TV in a lockable wooden cupboard that was wheeled from classroom to classroom.

I can’t recall watching much live, although I suppose we might have done, but we did watch schools programmes that had been taped.

Like people have mentioned, they could never find the channel the vcr was programmed into, pressed every button bar the right one, we would see clips of Richard and Judy in the process, and we might end up seeing the ITV schools on Channel 4 presentation as once they’d pressed play, they darent attempt to do any fast forwarding or pausing.

I think switching on an overhead projector and slapping on a hand written slide on the glass was about as technical as they got in those days.

I also remember listening to schools programmes that were taped off the radio as well, imagine that.

That reminds me of how at primary school we did listen to a couple of programmes on the old Radio 5 (during the short period it existed).