The Authority Announcement

I'd have thought the fact to allow a smoother transition from TV-am into the rest of the day's programmes. Obviously having Schools there 40 weeks of the year kept the start up gap for a further 4 years. I guess some Regions were more keen to get rid of it than others.

Of course some of those stations that kept them may have wanted to make clear its was completely sperate operations? Tvam car crash had nothing to do with them?

All i'm looking at is a blank box...

It's very faint, but there is something there. Dark purple against black though is hard to see.

I've written some of this stuff before but it's relevant to this thread. When ITV began, the ITA mandated a startup sequence, something necessary to allow TV sets to warm up and stabilise in advance of the start of programmes. This generally took about five minutes, and since having nothing on the screen would cause viewers to start fiddling with the controls, a tuning caption was crucial, as was some audio to go with it. I have the original memos from the ITA on the subject and they gave these the quaint name "Title Pages". The first 'page' would give the ITA name and the name of the local transmitter. This would be generated by the slide scanner at the transmitter itself. Then with about a minute to the start of programmes the transmitter would switch (bang, crash, flash, frame roll) to the local contractor who would show their own ident and announce the start of programmes.

Music would be provided on tape by the contractor, and the transmitter would play it out. If the music wasn't long enough, tone would be radiated first to fill the sequence out to a 5 minute duration.

This got refined over the years as most companies greatly preferred being in control of the whole sequence, so the "Title Page" (which became the tuning caption affectionately known as the 'Picasso' card because of its lack of symmetry) was generated by the contractor, thereby eliminating the flashes and frame roll. But Granada had two transmitters originating their own title pages, which is probably why the Granada music faded down completely at one point and then fades up again, but I'm guessing here.

As the lists of transmitters got longer the whole thing became rather unwieldy. First to go were transmitter names on the Picasso cards and test Cards - these were first replaced by the name of the region, and later by the name of the contractor. This looked fine except in London where the test card had to include the names of both Thames and LWT. Then the IBA came up with cards carrying full lists of all the local transmitters to be shown as 'title pages'. That also got out of hand - HTV had to show two cards one after another because there were so many relay stations in Wales. So in the end there was a single card made up with the IBA logo and the contractor's logo. or at least a version of it that the IBA's graphics people had to hand. But some were nothing like the official company logo so some companies started to mess about with the sequence (see the Central example further back in this thread).

When I joined STV in 1975 we still opened with "This is Scottish Television, broadcasting from the Black Hill, Rothesay, Rosneath, Lethanhill, Craigkelly and Darvel transmitters of the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Good morning from your announcer, Tony Currie" Note that the list had the transmitters simply in the order in which they were switched on - they're been added to the (very) tatty script in ballpoint pen each time a new one came along. Eventually, Brian Durkin - Head of Pres at STV - asked me to write something new that wouldn't take up half the morning to read. "This is Scottish Television, broadcasting from the IBA transmitters serving Central Scotland" was (if I remember correctly) the form I came up with. I typed it on a sheet of A4, sellotaped it to the desk and there it remained until the desk was demolished.

Interstingly, Tyne Tees never name-checked Chatton, despite it being classed as a main transmitter (albeit fed, I believe, from Pontop).

It is, though it's a tiddler in terms of population. More people are served by the Fenham relay

At the time of the Authority announcements Chatton only had one relay, at Rothbury, though it also provided the BBC feed for the Berwick relay. A second Chatton relay was opened at Wooler in 1991, and that was it until Berwick became a full relay of Chatton in December 2006 after it was re-assigned from Border to Tyne Tees.

The irony there being that the gap between TV-am and ITV programming persisted into 1988, and yet one of the very few stations that retained the authority announcement, Tyne Tees, was also one of the very few stations that bothered to fill the gap with anything (that anything being a local news bulletin, or a religious prologue on Sundays). Most other stations continued with a startup sequence, but without the announcement, preferring to just fill it with a few minutes of a programme menu.

I think we need to separate the startup sequence from the AA, as the former took much longer to go away at some stations than the latter. Interestingly, the AA seems to have been used as a branding tool at some companies as the startup was at others; TTT got rid of lengthy startup sequences pretty much as soon as they could get away with it, yet a non-IBA-referencing variant of the AA ("Serving the North East and North Yorkshire this is Tyne Tees") was used at the company well into the 1990s (right up until the closure of the presentation department at Newcastle in fact).

Speaking of Tyne Tees, from around 1986 until 1988, the authority announcement and other on-air references stopped mentioning 'the North East and North Yorkshire' and referred instead to 'the North of England'. Even the local news bulletins were no longer called the 'North East News', at least not verbally. Announcers were heard on occasion to say 'coming up after the ITN News, it's the North Eas.. er, North News". Obviously there was a reason for this temporary 'fad' - but there was no change to the catchment area so I'm quite baffled.

Since the news got moved back why wasn't there consultation about moving Berwick back to Border area?

Berwick has always carried BBC NE+C.

When the Border region became nothing more than a sub region of Tyne Tees, if made more sense
for Berwick to get 'vanilla' Tyne Tees. Anyway, since the mid 90s, with Border carrying Scottish opt outs
on Selkirk (which was what Berwick was a relay of for ITV/4) it didn't make sense that ITV at Berwick wasn't carrying
Tyne Tees (It could never have carried the English Caldbeck flavour of Border)

Secondly since DSO relays have to have the same parent for all muxes, otherwise you need to create a dedicated SIPSI region, ( as is the case for South Lakeland, BBC NW and Border)