BBC One English Regions opt outs

They still do occasionally produce a seperate bulletin for Scotland, most commonly on New Year's Eve

Blimey - and there I am - seemingly causing a massive argument about the difference between Opting In and Opting Out ... I have been here a long time haven't I ?!

I was wondering if anyone else remembered that Grandstand opt. AFAIK it was a very rare event and I'm not sure it's ever happened since.

I've got a couple of Radio Times from the late eighties where Great Britain, as was, were playing Australia in rugby league, in Australia, at about 6am, and it was only shown live in the Northern regions, the others not opening up at all. There were highlights nationwide later in the day. Of course, the Northern regions still do opt out for rugby league now.



This isn't the same, but I do remember in 2001, they were going to show an Edinburgh vs Ulster rugby match on Grandstand, and it was billed in all the TV guides, but then on the show itself they had to apologise because for contractual reasons they realised they could actually only show it in Scotland and Northern Ireland. They did show it in those nations and the network Grandstand cobbled together some replacement sport.

The local sports round-ups were after Grandstand and were what is now the Saturday teatime news, but in those days were pretty much 90% sport with just a brief round-up of news, if that. Of course, in those days the South East didn't have any regional programmes so Grandstand would come back in that region for another five minutes, billed as Today's Sport, which although it was only been shown in the South East wasn't specifically locally orientated (presumably it was handy in case any other region couldn't opt out). Des Lynam said that, despite it only lasting five minutes, it was a hundred times more complicated to do than the five-hour Grandstand they'd just done because it was just a relentless procession of graphics and photos, the presenter trying to time the script to match with it all, to the extent Des refused to do it eventually.

An interesting case here of an opt-out by BBC Look North NE & Cumbria in 2004.

They decide to interrupt the late film to provide coverage of a local referendum with a still ident and crash back into the film at the end.



I imagine nowadays regions would never be allowed to do such a thing without prior permission, even if they had the technical capability to do so.

I'm not sure they crashed back into the film, looks like they went back to the part they left it from.

Can't tell, because the clip doesn't show us the crash out. Did Newcastle have Profile servers back then, ( I think Southampton did), so it would have been quite easy to 'live delay' the film.

My jaw hit the ground in the USA when I saw a 15 minute newsflash for a shuttle launch, and just crashed back into a movie that had been left running. That was one of the three main networks, can't remember which one

Are you sure? It's only brief but at 1:28 I thought it showed them crashing out the film, looks like the same scene to me.

Ah, I only watched the beginning and end of the You Tube clip, yes you're right I think?!

Not quite in our region but BBC South West did opt-out of Grandstand in 1991 for the Rugby County Championship Final at Twickenham between Cornwall and Yorkshire. There's footage here from about 3 minutes in, Chris Rogers hosting the coverage.

Could be wrong, but facilities like OB units and other technical facilities, although based in Manchester were for the North and could be used by Leeds and Newcastle and were not exclusive to Manchester?

I had a similar experience covering Yacht racing in San Francisco Bay in 2013. The early rounds were only to be aired on COZI TV - which is a digital sister station to NBC.
It turned out it was a Bay Area only opt out. However as we got around to on air time, a film had started only 15 minutes earlier, and was in full flow. Bang on time a matrix switch was done with no con announcements or indeed anything at all, and our opening titles hit the air. Amazement all round from us Brits working there.
At the end, the same in reverse. Our closer finished, and bang, there was the last 20 minutes of the film that had been going out across the rest of the USA.
This is NBC, not exactly a tin pot operation!

That seems to be how it's done in the US, though I thought they usually had an announcement along the lines of 'We now join the film already in progress'?