Channel 4 pre-1993 regional opt outs

I wonder if, when necessary, Channel 4 liaised with the nominated contractor (THS/LWT) who passed on the info to the other regions via the red phone? I’m not aware of them having any talkback or direct voice link to the regions. That said, Tony Currie (presumably in his STV days) contacted C4 pres to advise them of a problem, so maybe C4 would call regions direct too. I can’t see them wanting to make 13/14 phone calls though to say “break 17 will be 30 seconds later than planned”.

Well yes, there's no mystery to just being able to pick up a phone and call a control room. That's just how telephones work.

There is the story/urban myth about someone phoning C4 pres pretending to be a senior boss and demanding that After Dark or similar was taken off air?



Well no, that's why they had the 'IDENT' system discussed above

BBC World’s IDENT system had the facility to add two lines of text at the bottom of the display. Used to be used a lot for advising partner broadcasters of things like changes to breaks, dropped programmes etc.

Yes usually used when a big news story broke and all ad breaks were pulled

The BBCs equivalent these days has a text field used to give the name of the newsreader on the 1/6/10 so the regions know which announcement to use

Yes they could of, but no they didnt.

The ‘red phone’ system simply continuously connected all the ITV presentation control rooms (and presentation offices) together so that any company could speak to any other company at will. It was a mixture of routine, scheduled conference calls, and ad hoc calls as necessary.

Indeed there was no system apart from the usual telephone. Where I worked the C4 MCR position did have a direct 4 wire to C4’s MCR but I don’t know if that was widespread, I suspect not.

So, could any company originate a call, and choose (by means of different buttons or codes) to speak to all, some, or just one of the other companies? Someone once said that the nominated contractor had to originate calls, but that would make little sense if Central wanted to brief everyone about an issue with schools programmes or CITV.

I think it has been said that the Nominated Contractor was the only one who could make the red phones ring. So if Central needed to use it they would get Thames to originate the call then they could talk to everyone.

Someone in a position to know tells me that only the nominated contractor could initiate a red phone call. If a local a Company wanted to speak to the rest of the network they would ring LWT/THS and ask them to initiate a conference call. All the control rooms naturally had the landline phone numbers of all the other companies, so if only a ‘one to one’ was needed they’d use that.

If Channel 4 was showing a sporting event, such as American Football, which over-ran for some reason, how quickly could C4 presentation in Charlotte Street get revised schedules sent out to the ITV companies? I'm also wondering, would C4 still send pulses to play out adverts from the regions, in such an event?

Presumably by updating the aforementioned IDENT screens, instantly.