26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

Didn't Granada have a "Widescreen Experience" earlier in the 90s? Or was that literally just showing stuff in letterbox?

I think the only reassignment of ITV regions after 1982, was in 2009 when the Isle of Man was moved from Border to Granada ?

Don't forget Berwick switched to tt at the same. I'm also sure south Oxfordshire switched to meridian.

Oh yes, you're right. That reminds me, also at DSO in the Granada and YTV regions, some relays
that were split between BB and ITV regions near the Lancs/Yorks border were unified (which was the reason why Berwick moved from Border to TTT too)

I think also the Lincoln relay moved from Central East to YTV, (to match the BBC's arrangement) ?

And there must have been a reason for displaying the then Network 2's schedule *above* that of RTE1.

After the ITV regions (which are shown alphabetically), the "other channels" are also shown the same way: Network2, RTE1, S4C.

Interesting that Ridge Hill's PSB2 West multiplex that allows N Gloucestershire to choose between ITV Central or ITV West is changing soon to QSPK mode with a reduction in power.

I did ask about CPV a while ago and I did post this a while back, but here it is again: from Ofcom

https://up.metropol247.co.uk/barcode/CPV%20TV%20Q3.pdf

ITC look at the plans and throw it in the bin, just like southern plans in 1981. David frost should have known better.

Well, yes, but it was still the case that Thames would get some stuff on air more or less because it was Thames' "turn" to do things. Actually in Independent Television In Britain it says that Thames weren't especially popular around the network because they would often throw their weight about and be very demanding. In the old system you would get things like LWT dropping Cannon and Ball in 1988 because they were considered too downmarket and their ratings were declining, only for them to be signed up by Yorkshire so they still had to show Cannon and Ball because Yorkshire were guaranteed X number of hours on a Saturday night.

Ostensibly the Network Centre would have stopped that, although obviously there were plenty of politics about. I remember reading that the various companies would bombard the Network Centre with stats about which shows performed below average in their regions, and there was that famous incident in 1997 when Beadle's Hotshots was dropped mid-run by request of LWT because it was perfoming so badly in what was a key slot for them - despite the fact it was actually made by LWT. But presumably the idea was to avoid weak shows staying on because it was the specific company's "turn" to fill this or that slot.



Well, yes, but many other companies were similarly rebuked - Yorkshire and Tyne Tees got a ticking off for doing too many pan-regional programmes of poor quality, and I remember HTV were criticised for the poor quality of their local programmes (at which point they immediately promoted them to 7pm on Mondays and Wednesdays and moved the network shows to 5.10 to prove a point).

As I mentioned, I've got no brief for Carlton and it is true that they had teething troubles in their first year and several programmes didn't work, but they were launching a lot of new programmes at once. There was probably also a factor in that quite a lot of people behind the scenes had vast experience in televison but maybe not so much in primetime ITV which is undoubtedly a very tough area to compete (Lose a Million is the perfect example, it might have worked on C4 or even BBC1, but not on primetime ITV).

Besides, LWT's first year or so on air was a total disaster, for many of the same reasons. Worked out OK for them in the end, didn't it?