You mist understand my point ref to the "EU" I was ref to European area.
Thank you Officer Crabteee
JM
JamesM0984
I remember watching what must have been lesbian porn on Sat 1 long before I knew what was really going on. I was young and I just remember 4 or 5 naked girls, albeit with very hairy labial detail, kissing.
I remember watching what must have been lesbian porn on Sat 1 long before I knew what was really going on. I was young and I just remember 4 or 5 naked girls, albeit with very hairy labial detail, kissing.
Not something I was expecting to read on TV Forum this evening, I have to say.
I remember watching what must have been lesbian porn on Sat 1 long before I knew what was really going on. I was young and I just remember 4 or 5 naked girls, albeit with very hairy labial detail, kissing.
Not something I was expecting to read on TV Forum this evening, I have to say.
Not to go too off-topic but in relation to the Sat 1 post above, I remember when I was 14/15 and we had an analogue set-up and I stayed up late one night and decided to channel hop and see what the foreign channels were showing out of boredom. I was surprised by how every ad break was filled with nothing but sex line ads, many of them featuring topless women and one in particular of a woman standing in a phone box doing something very naughty indeed with the receiver. Certainly not something you would have seen on UK television ad breaks!
The big anomaly was that channels were broadcasting direct to peoples homes from abroad - Sky for example. They were effectively pirate broadcasts into the uk, the only regulation they had is if they were on cable when the Cable Authority got involved in programme standards.
In theory, yes. Any satellite TV channel not regulated by Ofcom or another EU regulator that can be received in Britain is effectively a pirate broadcast.
It was satellite TV (and not Death on the Rock) that resulted in the winding up of the IBA and the creation of the ITC with its 'light touch' legislation.
I read an article from the early 1990s about broadcasting without frontiers that mentioned potentially problematic issues with pan-European satellite TV channels such as advertising restrictions in certain countries or the 9PM watershed in the UK.
There were many issues with satellite-delivered channels in the early days. Those that were direct-to-home (albeit direct to a pretty huge dish!) were effectively unregulated. However, almost none fell into that category. In their pursuit of extra channels to offer subscribers, the new cable companies would clutch at any straws they could find, and as a consequence practically every satellite channel in Europe (except FilmNet) ended up having to comply with the Cable Authority programme code, which I wrote and which wasn't that different from the IBA's code at the time. The satellite stations were generally willing to comply because at that time they had far more potential viewers on cable than DTH. When the ITC replaced the IBA, it also absorbed the Cable Authority and adopted most of its rules.
As for ITV's early involvement in satellite channels - yes there were various shareholdings. The very first overnight ITV experiment was made by Yorkshire television who filled much of the wee small hours with programming from Music Box (a British forerunner of MTV). The ITV companies started to panic when they saw cable takeup begin to rise (albeit very slowly) and rather arrogantly decided to show those newcomers how to do it properly and launched Super Channel, which had major ITV shareholdings. Unfortunately the programmers had failed to consider the little problem of rights and on day two had to pull a raft of scheduled programmes (including Emmerdale) because the rights had not been cleared. I remember it very well! It wasn't very long before ITV gave it up and sold Super Channel to a bunch of Italians who gave me quite a few regulatory problems before they, in turn, flogged the remains of the channel to NBC who relaunched it as CNBC.
The issue with unregulated satellite channels from overseas led to another issue, namely broadcasting rights. I seem to recall one year the Cyclassics cycle race in Hamburg was only being shown in highlights form on Eurosport, as they had other things scheduled, and they were also UK rights holder. But ADR1, a german language channel, was broadcasting the race live, and it could be picked up on an analogue sky system in the UK. So, this resulted in viewers, me included, being able to watch the race live in the UK, but the channel concerned did not have UK domestic rights to it.
Not to go too off-topic but in relation to the Sat 1 post above, I remember when I was 14/15 and we had an analogue set-up and I stayed up late one night and decided to channel hop and see what the foreign channels were showing out of boredom. I was surprised by how every ad break was filled with nothing but sex line ads, many of them featuring topless women and one in particular of a woman standing in a phone box doing something very naughty indeed with the receiver. Certainly not something you would have seen on UK television ad breaks!
Point I was making is it was not something even in the 90s you'd get away with "in the clear" in the UK.
