Analogue Cable Memories

Go on then, who remembers analogue cable TV? The days of Cambridge Cable, Cable and Wireless, Telewest etc.

A few things I remember were, for some reason in Cambridge, we had BBC One on 01, BBC Two on 03, Anglia (as it was then) on channel 11, Channel 4 on 24 and Channel 5 on 04. I never understood the bizarre channel numbering that Cambridge Cable used back in the day.

Then there was the way that the Scientific Atlanta boxes would display the channel names. There was only space for 4 characters which meant you got some bizarre abreviations, most notably CCIN for Carlton Cinema, NATG for National Geographic and BBCN for BBC News 24.

The channel guide channel which would appear as a barker on empty channels that departed. Possibly the first EPG of its kind?

Then there were the channels that came and went CMT, which pulled out of Europe, TCC, Carlton Food Network, Live TV etc.

I always wondered where the receiving centres were for local analogue cable distribution and how they went about converting the digital channels to be available in analogue form via cable in the last few years of its existence.

Here's some of my own videos I uploaded a while back, all from Diamond Cable (Nottingham):



I know where our local recieving centre was, as we drove past it in 1998, had loads of dishes adorned with the Diamond Cable logo (looking on google maps it's still there, but obviously with the Virgin Media logo- and the dishes seem to have gone! Still called "Diamond Plaza" 17 years after they dropped the name though!)

Our street was one of the earliest to be cabled in our town when Midland Cable (later Telewest) launched in the early 1990s but not many of the residents took it up so as kids we would go to one house that had it and spend hours running up the bill requesting videos on The Box.

I can remember watching the BT-owned Westminster Cable when staying at a relative's around 2000 - it eventually became part of Virgin Media who closed it down in 2011 rather than upgrade it to digital.

A couple of years later living in Lincoln we had what was then NTL's broadband and learnt the trick of splitting the signal to get a few TV channels which turned out better than the analogue terrestrial offering as we were in an area served by a small relay transmitter, so it saved installing an aerial and lots of cabling from the other side of the house.

My first memories are seeing Nickelodeon in the clear for the first time round a mates house who could afford cable back then. My parents did have one of the very first Sky subscriptions that came with a Amstrad dish but they didn't renew it so most of the time I was greeted to the video crypt scrambling of the multi channels.

Why was channel 3 called ITV1 in that first clip? It was pre-ITV2 so seems especially odd.

Thanks for posting these, they're fantastic. Oasis - D'You Know What I Mean, you can't get more 1997 than that.

Dual region maybe? Diamond also covered Lincoln where Central and Yorkshire were both available, so I'd imagine they were in Nottingham also.

I've just remembered FM radio was available down cable too if plugged into a receiver , I can definitely remember Trent FM being available on it (possibly on a different frequency to over the air).

They didn't! Well,. they were both there through the analogue pass-through (if you plugged the cable straight into the TV), but they weren't there on the cable box itself.

Although even then it was the Belmont versions- whereas we got Emley through our aerial.

They are both available on the EPG though digital though (again, te Belmont versions- we still have Emely through the aerial).

If you look, my 1999 video of the channel guide has the FM frequencies on it.

It's still around in Ireland, courtesy of Virgin Media - one of the few forms of analogue television left in Western Europe at this stage. One of the reasons it's still around is that analogue cable was - in most places, except Cork - never encrypted here (except for Sky Sports and Sky Movies, although they are both long gone from analogue) and thus it is simply "plug and play". For that reason a lot of people in Dublin still use it to feed old CRT sets in kitchens and bedrooms.

Channels offered (in Dublin) are RTE One, RTE Two, TV3, TG4, 3e, UTV Ireland, BBC One NI, BBC Two NI, Channel 4, Sky One, Sky News, Eir Sport 1 (for another fortnight anyway) Nickelodeon/Paramount (yes, still shared even now!), MTV and Discovey. I reckon it's probably the only remaining analogue outlet for most of these channels.

Love those Diamond Cable captures. I was so excited when my Dad let the salesman in and took a package from them.

Great to see the Diamond Cable version of The Box, complete with its terrible NTSC-PAL conversion (leaving the picture looking very very washed out).

The satellites on Daleside Road were still there until quite recently; the analogue service was still going until I think 2010 and those were used to supply them and possibly the locally inserted channels on the DTV service (I believe Virgin now have a proper nationwide network). The Diamond Cable logos was replaced by an NTL ones around 2001, and then they were just plain white for a short while before their removal.

It was definitely on there by 1999, ISTR Yorkshire was on Ch 8. (The labels were CENT and YORK, I'm pretty sure).

I remember plugging the cable socket into my old CRT back in 2008 and I still managed to get few channels, albeit three. BBC Two, BBC Parliament and Paramount.
And I remember having analogue cable as a young kid back then, possibly with C&W.