BBC2 Regions

Bristol did indeed provide a pan-regional political programme at 12:02 on Sunday afternoons, entitled 'Out of Westminster' (neatly getting round the difficult-to-name macro region). The opt slot was notable for being preceded by a two-minute pan-regional news bulletin (rather more clumsily named 'News South & West'). This was long before Sunday regional news programmes became common, so was a curious practice. It also meant the otherwise unusual BBC TWO South & West ident was used twice in two minutes.

On one occasion, Out of Westminster (and presumably the other regional programmes) had to be rescheduled at short notice, and ended up in a very late evening slot on BBC1. This was unfortunate, since Bristol did not have a 'South & West' branded version of the COW, so had to announce the programme over a breakdown slide.

At the time, there was a repeat of the regional politics programmes on Monday afternoons. Without the pan-regional news bulletin (which couldn't be repeated), the opt slot would have been two minutes short of content. So each of BBC South, BBC South West and BBC West had an extra regional news bulletin to fill. I seem to remember that it was scheduled very close to the 'usual' regional bulletin, which was unfortunate.

Later, as has been observed, the regions launched their own programming and the pan-regional offering from Bristol ceased. Southampton's programme ultimately became 'South on Sunday', presented by the inimitable Bruce Parker in some very loud shirts.

'South & West' did continue a little longer though, with a series of 'Screen South & West' and, I think, some pan-regional 'Restoration' opt-outs. I've read somewhere that some work had to be done to prevent the Hannington transmitter throwing a wobbly when it was expected to rebroadcast Bristol-originated content rather than Southampton's.

After a while of this arrangement the network to Southampton and Plymouth was re-engineered to be fed from Bristol Comms, so they could switch the studio into the network feed for those regions so they didn't need to staff a gallery to opt out. Before that it had to be routed via London tying up contribution lines.

Bristol's gallery had to act as network and "call the opt" for Southampton and Plymouth for the repeat, which apparently didn't come easy to them and there were numerous cock-ups.

Yep - calling opts is very odd when you've spent ages following them. It's even more complex in some of the regions with sub-opts.

Norwich have to opt-out of network, but then call an opt-out and opt-in for Cambridge during Look East, and then opt-back to network. Sometimes they call multiple opts in the show (for split sport or entertainment VTs).