26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

I'm sure that's true; especially considering that Meridian initially intended to be more like Carlton, a more slimline publisher-broadcaster than like TVS and more traditional ITV. I'm going off the top of my head here but I recall that them buying TVS' studios was far from certain in the early stages.

That being said, I still feel it's unlikely that there was a big swap over of personal at midnight. Clearly much if surely not most of Meridian's staff would've been from TVS considering for the TVS staff there would not be that many similar broadcasting jobs available that wouldn't involve relocating and surely it was in Meridian's interests to have continuity and a smooth changeover.

Even if there was this march of new people into the control room at the stroke of midnight: what were they doing when the outgoing TVS staff were messing about twiddling knobs (ooh, er, missus!)? Maybe a fistfight broke out and someone fell on a console causing the picture disturbances. It's fun to think of such shenanigans but I still feel there's probably much more mundane reasons for the picture disturbances that night.

There were no picture disturbances from what I remember, only a 5 second loss of audio of Big Ben's chimes.

Quite a few ex TVS people, ended up at LNN at launch by the way (including senior editorial staff)

Quite a few ex TVS people, ended up at LNN at launch by the way (including senior editorial staff)

As you'd expect, of the newspapers I can access for this period (only via Newsbank in this case), Andrew Neil's Sunday Times was the most overtly "it doesn't go far enough - let's have total deregulation". The Express also thought it was too much of a mish-mash with too much of a traditional conservative influence (via Hurd & Mellor, as stated above).