Analogue TV memories

My parents used to get Grampian and Scottish on Channel 3 depending on what the weather was like.

The worst thing is trying to tune in digital TV with a set top aerial is if you don't live in a brilliant signal area. At least with analogue you got a picture however fuzzy when setting up and trying to tune in and you could move the aerial around to get the best picture, and even if the signal wasn't great, it was still watchable. Whereas with digital, if the signal's poor you can't even get it to find any channels, so sometimes you need to rescan about 50 times with the aerial in different positions to get SOMETHING to even attempt to know where to put the aerial, and if you can't get a brilliant signal, then it breaks up and isn't watchable anyway.

I suffered this last week setting a TV up for my 95 year old grandmother, and even after that, having to place the aerial in a really awkward place as it's the only place where it won't keep breaking up, I can only get the two PSB MUXes (though she pretty much only watches Pointless and Songs of Praise these days so that's not a massive problem for her).

I also got Hannington from London, using an indoor aerial back in the day. Was a decent picture most of the time too. I also got Sudbury once as well.

Buried deep in the Sutton Coldfield transmission area well away from any other transmitters (apart from when weather conditions permitted) I didn't have much choice in the analogue stakes. When Channel 5 came along and they decided it was going to transmit from Lichfield as opposed to Sutton Coldfield, it was never as clear as the other networks, but it was acceptable.

I think we managed to get Yorkshire fighting with Central once due to atmospheric conditions, and it generated a fascinating ghosting effect on the TV as IIRC Central and Yorkshire shared the same UHF channel numbers which under normal circumstances wouldn't clash.

I used to be able to receive HTV Wales, Central and Granada from a rooftop aerial pointed at Sutton Coldfield. Now, I can only receive Central in this digital era.

My grandmother's TV setup can see West Midlands and East Midlands on the Freeview channel list, presumably because she's right at the top of the hill in the area, with nothing else in direct line of sight for miles at 270m above sea level. It may have been the same in the analogue days but of course you wouldn't have had a way of distinguishing between East and West until the local news came on.

Weren't the adverts different on east and west too? I think they still are.

Yes - also some ITV regions had more advertising sub-regions than news sub-regions, with the split regional news being enabled as a by-product of configuring their distribution to allow this split.

I believe ITV Meridian's Whitehawk Hill was one such example of a quirk with the sub-regions, news was the same as from Rowridge, but was put in with the eastern half of the region for advertising. I believe that Whitehawk Hill is still a special case thanks to BBC1 South East being on the same mux as ITV Meridian which still has the West opt for news today.

Here's an analogue TV memory.

Through the late 80s and early 90s the ITV regions used to show Australian soap Prisoner Cell Block H late at night. Granada treated it as a schedule filler. It would appear on seemingly random combinations of Sunday, Monday and Thursday nights, but sometimes weeks would pass with no episodes at all.

Every ITV region was at a different stage in Prisoner's history. In Granada's case the episodes were about 8 years old when they were first aired.

Living in Granadaland I could occasionally pick up HTV or Central (depending on weather conditions) and get a glimpse of 6 months into the "future" of Prisoner, albeit with a terrible picture quality and no audio. This was a strange quirk of being hooked on a soap that you had no peripheral knowledge of because the TV listings magazines never ran articles about it and needless to say, there was no internet. (As a fan, the limit of my knowledge was that the show had ceased production, but I never had the faintest idea at any given time of how many episodes were remaining).

I recall being 6 or 7, during the school holidays, and the frustration of hearing the presenter plugging something great coming up - only for a BBC Scotland continuity announcer to butt in and introduce something in Gaelic, like Dotaman .

On one occasion, I spent some time trying to tune the preset for channel 5 on that telly to BBC Two England (I clearly had no reason to know English regions existed back then), despite being in Glasgow and having no hope of receiving anything else.