Analogue Cable Memories

Looking at the video I uploaded, it was actually 54- which was still a Front Row Channel however. At one time they used to show Sky Soap on the channel too (which also shared with History on satellite), but they'd stopped showing that by the time we got cable in early 99 (and it shut down not much later anyway).

Also, on those videos I put in you can see they changed the mosaic- in the middle it used to be a Diamond Cable logo, they changed it to showing Front Row 50 (the preview channel) shortly before they became NTL. There was one day where the screen in the middle was actually showing Sky One- I presume this was them being tryiong to be clever as they used the audio from Virgin Radio over the mosasic, and this was the time the Chris Evans Breakfast show was simulcast on Sky One- but they didn't/couldn't change it back to Front Row 50 after.

Alsop notice how on both videos there's one screen that's blank for some reason- on the 1997 video it's the one above the bottom right square, so we don't see the Channel Guide, "Superchan" (which I'm guessing was NBC Europe) or Sky Gold (which would have been Sky Movies Gold), but by 1999 it had moved to the bottom right, so we didn't see Eurosport, MTV or Cartoon Network on there. I don't remember it ever being "fixed" either.

Also when it comes to the identifcation on the Channel Guid- in the videos I've got you can see it with Diamond Cable and NTL branding, but for a short while after the NTL rebranding it just said "channel guide" in the same stle that's on the grid under the listngs (barely visible in the video recordings sadly- it was more visible on broadcast), which I presume was the default log on the software itself (another video in this thread shows Nynex/C&W used the same software at one time too).

Also another thing I've got are these Front Row colourbars, I only saw them a couple of times, managed to get a recording once. Presumably appearing in error, it abruptly cuts mid-way into a Front Row promo. One of the times I saw it, it also had a caption in the corner with the channel number on, but not on the recording I got of them.



And one final memory I've got to add, while we had analogue cable, we had these awful rubber remote controls where after a few months the rubber around the buttons would rip and the buttons would fall out. We only had analogue cable for 2 years, but we must have had 4 or 5 replacement remotes int hat time, god knows why Scientific Atlanta made and kept issuing them. Nobody else we knew who had cable had those awful things!

Edit, just looked on google and found a photo of one of the awful things

I think they replaced the square remotes with the orange and grey buttons. I remember us having one of them before we switched to Sky around 2001. I bought one of those original Scientific Atlanta remotes off eBay a while ago and I don't know why... Even more so when I bought one of the original Scientific Atlanta receivers. I must've been drunk.

Victor Lewis-Smith is the owner of Associated Rediffusion and the *Star* logo, as used in his own shows like TV Offal (classic and still love it).

Makes sense. Those are the same as Sky analogue.

As some regulars here will know, I was the Controller of programmes at the Cable Authority, and so I probably knew more about cable TV programming than anyone at the time. I regularly visited cable operators around the UK (including tiny systems in Wales and Scotland - Irvine Cable, anyone?) and viewed all the major channels plus all the local channels on a daily basis. Both in my office and at home I had the rather bizarre Westminster Cable which had channels A1, B1, C1 etc and perhaps the very earliest form of two-way text communication. Some day, I promise, I shall write a book about it all, complete with stories like the time an American would-be cable operator tried to bribe Cable Authority officials with chocolate, and the day I yelled at the poor TC at MTV to take a banned video off the air before the naughty bit hit the screen. (They did - with a split second to go!) I've still got a monstrous pile of Cable Guides branded with every conceivable name, and an assortment of boxes and remotes - I even still have my Clyde CableVision hard hat!!! It was a time largely forgotten, when very briefly local television looked like it might fly. Aberdeen Cable's news programme, hosted by Jimmy Spankie and produced by Rachel Chancellor. Clyde's TV studio with awkward pillars in the middle that cameras had to avoid, and a news programme directed by Joyce Taylor. Other recollections in this thread: http://tvforum.uk/tvhome/uk-cable-tv-days-sky-bsb-31302/

Hi Tony,

What was the reason for the bizarre channel numbering on Cambridge Cable/NTL Analogue in Cambridge?

01 BBC One, 03 BBC Two, 11 ITV, 24 Channel 4, 04 Channel 5.

There were also other regions where the terrestrial channels appeared on rather odd numbers.

Not Jimmy Krankie?
http://eplwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/wee-jimmy.jpg

Wikipedia is (again) not clear, but is that the same company which became part of Smallworld Cable, and survived being gobbled up by Virgin Media until 2014?

My memories of analogue cable tv are actually from the aforementioned Irvine Cable TV (ICTV). I will probably go into a bit of a ramble with this post. The service was quite small and served only a few thousand houses mainly those built by the Irvine Development Corporation. I think the main idea behind it was to save the houses having 'unsightly' aerials attached to them.

My memories of the cable system start in the 80s when I was a kid. There was a basic relay service which provided BBC 1 & 2 Scotland, STV, Channel 4, Ulster TV, BBC 1 NI & Sky One on the UHF band. There was a small fee for this service which was paid for through local authority rents and if tenants had bought their house they could pay an annual fee to keep the service. Ulster TV would sometimes get removed for a few days to showcase a premium channel to try and tempt people to subscribe. The relay service changed a few times over the years with the removal of BBC 1 NI and the addition of a Channel Guide. The channel guide showed now and next listings over pictures of the local area along with music. It had a teletext service providing full listings for each channel for a week. The Chanel guide was closed after a while and replaced by NBC Super Channel. By the time the service ceased in 2006 UTV had been replaced by ITV2, NBC by Channel 5 and an additional channel with CBeebies/BBC3 sharing had been added.

Back to the 80s and my parents had a TV with multi-band tuner which picked up the VHF band. The premium channels were broadcast on this band and we were able to tune in all of the cable channels for free just by plugging into the wall socket. Channels available at the time included Lifestyle, Super Channel, Bravo, Discovery, The Children's Channel, Prem1ere, Screensport, and others. There was a kids channel called Kindernet which I can remember watching Supergran on which was dubbed into Dutch. There was also Home Video Channel (HVC) which we were told was played out from the cable headend on tapes which were sent to the cable company by the channel. I believe Bravo may also have originally been broadcast this way.

After a few years they eventually started scrambling the channels so they couldn't be viewed without a decoder. My parents subscribed to the service for a while and the decoder box we had back then didn't have a remote - you had to change the channels with a dial on the box. A few of my friends had the service too and some of the boxes had the ICTV logo on them. I've searched online to try and find a photo of the decoder but have never been able to find one like it. There was an option to have a meter attached to the decoder which you topped up with £1 coins to continue viewing. I vaguely remember there being a listings magazine available for the service although I'm not sure if this was a specific guide for ICTV or just a generic cable guide. With my parents being a subscriber I was able to join the 'Junior Cable Club' which let me attend fun days etc that the company hosted. I still have my membership card for it

My parents stopped subscribing after a few years and we returned to the basic relay service. At some point in the early 90s the service was taken over by BT Cable TV services. We started subscribing again around 1996 by which time the boxes had been upgraded and now came with a remote The channels available included the various Sky multichannels at the time as well as cable exclusives like L!VE TV. We stopped subscribing after a couple of years and went back to the relay service. We had got a new TV in the late 90s which again had a VHF tuner. We were able to tune in Sky News, QVC, L!VE TV & Cartoon Network/TNT for free but the other channels were scrambled.

By 2000 we had got Sky Digital and rarely used the relay service anymore. In the early 2000s BT sold the service to a company called Metro Cable TV Ltd. Around this time a new company called OMNE started to lay cables for a new digital cable service in the area. That service would later become Wight Cable North then Smallworld Cable before eventually being taken over by Virgin a couple of years ago. With the advent of digital services like Sky Digital, On Digital & the new digital cable service the analogue service finally ceased on 30th September 2006.

The satellite dishes used for the analogue service were located at the BT Telephone Exchange at the end of my street. There was also a mast which was used to pick up the terrestrial services. The dishes have been removed for a few years now but the mast is still there although it no longer has any aerials attached to it. When I was a kid I was always interested in how the cable service worked . I just wished I had been able to have a visit into the ICTV building back then to see it all in action.

Some Pics (I don't have access to my scanner at the moment so have had to take some pics with my phone) :

Irvine Cable TV Logo
Junior Cable Club
BT Cable - How to connect decoder
BT Cable Irvine Channel Guide May 96
May 96 Channel Guide 2
BT Cable Irvine Channel Guide Oct 96
Old Cable building at front and old mast visible behind main BT exchange building
Another view of the mast

Cheers for that potted history!

this pic has a lot of curiosities.
- Ulster being the top-billed relay channel seems odd. Does the town have a big Northern Irish population, or is Divis just particularly easy to receive?
- the non-relay channels don't have channel numbers listed, but 'keystokes'
- CMT is on channel 19 from midnight till noon, and 22 from 7pm-7am (the latter clashing with Nickelodeon for an hour on weekdays)
- Channel 26 got a lot of use, being shared between Sky Soap, Sky Travel, THC, The Christian Channel, Sky Sports 2, and Sky Sports Gold. Was that just a direct relay of an Astra 1 channel?
- And who knew the BT logotype font had more letters! I think it's pretty obvious why it wasn't more widely used.

Fantastic post dmch82, really interesting.

It sounds like a similar setup to what they had in Milton Keynes - if it was then aluminium cabling was used which can't be used to carry digital signals in the same way coaxial can. BT bought the cable system there too but were forced to dispose of all their cable interests in the end, although MK went until only a few years ago with their system (run by VM but the infrastructure managed by BT).

Bravo and HVC were definitely both played out at the cable headend as you say.

The Box used to be individual and played out from cable headends too, not sure when all the individual versions closed and were replaced with the national Sky service. Ours did in the Autumn on 1999 (which was a shame as it was free to phone, but the national one was premium rate), but I beleive some other company's versions went on for longer, certainly well into 2000.