Analogue Cable Memories

I remember being very excited as a young lad getting Cable and Wireless in the summer of 1997, mainly because I could watch The Disney Channel, only to find we weren't subscribed to it. It did introduce me to the wonderful world of Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon however. Even as a 24 year old man I can still watch endless episodes of Cow and Chicken.

It's just bizarre to think how "few" channels existed on cable back then, yet we have so many today despite loathing most of them. The triple threat of The Box, MTV and VH1 was not to be sniffed at. Wouldn't dare stumble anywhere near a music channel nowadays.

Cable was how the Rediffusion brand name survived the merger of their ITV franchise into Thames. They had a service called Rediffusion Cablevision in later years. The company lasted until 1988 when it got taken over.
http://www.rediffusion.info/

My mum can remember cable in the 70/80's in London, she thinks it showed an extra channel.

Doesn't Victor Lewis-Smith still own the trademark?

To be fair Analogue Cable was decent, you got near enough every channel that there was on Sky, cable exclusive channels and less of the foreign channels that were on Astra, quite obviously the main German channels that were available.

The problem with cable was that there was a lot of bizarre channel sharing that didn't make sense. I can think of the following that did happenstance one time or another.

Nickelodeon and The Performance Channel
TV5 and The Performance Channel
TV5 and SAT.1 (8pm-5am)
God Channel (4-7am) and Eurosport
God Channel (4-11am) and Animal Planet
Bloomberg (2-6am) and Discovery/H&L
Weather Channel and Travel (12pm-12am)
History Channel (12-10pm) and Adult Channel
Shop! (6am-12pm) and Challenge TV
Granada Good Life and National Geographic
Granada Breeze and MUTV
UK Style and UK Arena (3pm-3am weekends only)

We got some channels on longer than Sky Analogue, but the set ups were strange.

Not sure when it was switched off in our area, but I remember seeing it active as late as 2006. They even carried ITV News Channel at one point after the Channel Guide was axed.

Isn't it the "Assosiated-Rediffusion" trademark he owns, rather than Rediffusion as a whole?

Wasn't that British Relay Television? I seem to recall that in other parts of the country people could pick up Thames in London as the extra channel. I remember my Mum telling me she would go round her friends house as they had BRT and could watch Batman - which wasn't available on Anglia.

We had a different channel sharing arrangement in Cambridge.

CNBC Europe / TV Travel Shop / Challenge
Nickelodeon / Paramount
TNT/TCM / Cartoon Network

We didnt get GOD, Animal Planet etc.

We did receive UK Horizons on channel 33 part time until 5pm. I remember contacting/complaining to NTL why other regions had it 24hrs and in Cambridge we had it part time. I got a response back by snail mail saying it was arrangement they had in place with the channel. One month later the channel became available 24hrs, strange that.

Why were all the terrestrial channels so bizarelly numbered/allocated?

Channel 08 was the home of Cambridge RedTV. Irronically the channel guide always listed this as 'Community' until a month before the channel closed and it was changed to 'Cambridge Red'. The 4 characters said 'COMM' and never changed to 'RED_' which was always odd.

The timeshare between CNBC, TV Travel Shop and Challenge was on Sky too, this was a short period between April and July 1998, between TCC closing and TVTS operating for longer. The CNBC simulcast used to be on Bravo's slot. Prior to January 1998, it was EBN.

EBN was cable only, but CNBC was available 24 hours a day on Sky at this point, the simulcast of CNBC was useless when EBN merged.

On our cable, Challenge was shared with the God channel for some reason.

There's loads of Rediffusion infrastructure still in place in Nottingham. I'll take some pictures next time I'm there.
It was an incredibly easy system to pirate - I think I've read that the house-to-house rings were even 'hacked' when the system fell out of use.


I seem to recall History time shared with Front Row Channel 53?

According to super-reliable Wikipedia, he owns the name "Associated Rediffusion" and the star logo for his own production company.