26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

Which parts of East Surrey? Presumably further east than Reigate itself, where BBC1 London is on channel 101 on Sky.

Dartford postcodes cover both Kent and South London, DA1 to DA4 cover Dartford and surrounding villages (some are actually are in Sevenoaks district) DA5 to DA8 cover Erith/Belvedere area of South London DA9 to DA13 cover Swanscombe, Northfleet and Gravesend and DA14 to DA18 cover Belvedere, Welling etc up to the Greenwich border at Abbey Wood which is London SE2 postcode.
There are some postcodes in Dartford that I do believe have BBC1 SE on 101, I think the border runs along the M25. I am DA1 and can see the M25 from my window, unfortunately I think I am on the wrong side!!

Interesting regarding the similar situation in Surrey, this makes me think that country wide there must be many more alomanies. Perhaps Sky should re-assess the areas and update their database.
Do Virgin also use the same system as Sky?

As said, it’s up to the relevant broadcasters and not the platform operators to determine which region maps to a particular postcode. Therefore I would expect Sky, Freesat, and Virgin all to align together?

Thanks for the reply, yes understand now, so based on that broadcasters would give the same instructions to all platform providers and Sky, Virgin and Freesat would therefore be the same.

Anglia was the least popular choice for residents of south Essex although they considered Southend as part of their newsgathering territory. The area around Stansted and Bishop's Stortford is also disputed territory.

Wasnt parts of Northamptonshire also in dispute ?

Bishop Stortford is Crystal Palace's northerly most relay (and East Grinstead the southerly most, 200 metres further south than nearby Forset Row another CP relay) All for technical reasons

Indeed. Here in the southern end of North Yorkshire, we were assigned Yorkshire when ITV first launched on Sky.

When ITV added the sub-opts to DSat, we were switched to Tyne Tees South, despite places like Harrogate, Selby and York having more far affinity with Leeds than Middlesbrough or Newcastle.

After another few years, we were switched back to Yorkshire. I'm not sure if this was due to public feedback or the axing of the Tyne Tees South news opts.

Througout all this though, we've always had BBC One Yorkshire on 101 since BBC regions went on Sky.

You were fortunate. When the BBC first launched their English regions on Sky, they cut and pasted the mapping from ITV's template. So people in Oxford ended up with West Midlands. It was soon corrected.

The BBC are indeed far more thorough with their mapping. I think GU postcodes in and around Guildford are mapped to South, (whereas the Guildford transmitter carries London (and has to, because it's used deep into SW London) and similarly Weymouth is mapped to South, whereas its transmitter is South West (again because it's used all along Lyme Bay and into Devon, just )

I don't think that the south and south east region was any more (or less) unstable than the south west region that had Westward, TSW, Westcountry, and Carlton.

Southern lost because of a combination of its shareholding structure and ownership and the way it had become staid with a lack of ambition. The IBA thought that it was ideally time for a change in the south and south east region. TVS lost because it was a financial wreck as a result of the MTM purchase. Meridian got taken over by (or actually sold to) Granada.

The south and south east region had a much higher proportion of ABC1 residents than average but both Southern and TVS knew this which is why they were highbrow and committed themselves to making local programmes for this demographic in order to attract viewers to ITV. TVS originally wanted to make niche programmes for discerning viewers rather than bludgeoned mass entertainment.

Southern was happy to be a medium sized ITV company for the largest region in the network that wasn't in the big 5 with only a minimal presence outside of their region apart from children's programmes but TVS was more ambitious. The region became very lucrative in the 1980s but TVS was restrained as a company by the difficulty in obtaining time slots for networked programmes resulting in a limited presence outside of their region. By 1987 they were one of the most profitable ITV companies. If TVS had been included in the big 5 (or the big 5 made the big 6) then it's possible that the history of ITV could have been different if TVS decided not to buy MTM and later won the 1991 franchise round. TVS could have been a counterweight to Carlton after 1992. Meridian has often been likened to Southern as another medium sized company that preferred to stay within its own region, but by 1993 the takeovers by Carlton and Granada began in full force which did not provide much opportunity for Meridian to make a large impact nationally although it took over Anglia in 1994 before being taken over by Granada in 2000.

If the ITC had a policy where one applicant could only apply for one region in 1991 then both Carlton and CPV would almost certainly have applied for London weekday, resulting in the south and south east being a straight fight between TVS and Meridian. Whether Meridian would have bid (as high as) £36.5m and TVS made their eye-watering bid of £59.8m in such a scenario is a question that may never be answered. Does anybody know which of the three competitors TVS feared the most that resulted in their “bid high or die” strategy? A bid of just £23m would have cleared both Carlton and CPV.

This is quite a radical suggestion, but if the Network South model had been applied to the whole of ITV (one company with numerous sub-regions each having their own local news and identity) then Bluebell Hill could have ended up as the transmitter for a Thames Estuary sub-region officially covering both north Kent and South Essex.

Hmm, So in YTV's case Belmont could have been a transmitter for East Yorkshire/Lincolnshire, Sheffield for South Yorkshire/North Midlands and Scarborough for York/North Yorks Coast with the smaller transmitters acting as relays:

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/56622/yorkshire_v2.2.pdf