Earliest regional TV memories

Do you think on boundaries of ITV regions, and for instance I'm thinking of Border and Granada, that an advertiser for a company in, say, Lancaster, may have decided to get their ad screened on Border as well as Granada?

Growing up in Newport, most people I knew had two aerials - one that would point to Wenvoe and get the Wales region and one that would point to Mendip for the West. We used to have to reach around the back of the TV and swap the coax leads but my granddad had a switch that would change between the two aerials. The reasoning behind all this was to get BBC/HTV Wales but being able to switch to Channel 4 instead of S4C.

If people only had one aerial, then Mendip was the direction of choice. I seem to remember at the time of Channel 5 launching, the decision was taken not to transmit from Wenvoe as their research showed that most of South East Wales (ie the most affluent region of Wales) were pointing at Mendip anyway.

It used to be a nightmare if you had a portable TV in your bedroom as if you wanted to watch something on Channel 4 which wasn't on S4C at the same time, you'd have to stay up downstairs. Handy for the 10pm screening of Brookside though.

Nice to have a thread here which makes me feel young.

And I think that 10pm airing of Brookside probably kept S4C in the black for many years - it was a slot that worked for it and attracted attention the other side of the Welsh border too - indeed I think Phil Redmond was quite keen for C4 to move it to 10pm towards the end.


Another thought but I wonder how ITV might had evolved if C5 had been set up with a regional element rather than purely as a national service.

Well, from 1993 Granada used to sell and play out Border's commercials, so I imagine that option was available to advertisers.

Was the Border advertising region ever split at all? I have a number of early 90s recordings from the Dumfries region and the majority of ads seem to be for SW Scotland businesses, and very few for Cumbria or the eastern Borders. I assume the recordings will be from the Caldbeck 'Border Scotland' feed or a dependent.

I can remember the Express and Star used to carry variations for Granada, but we lived in an area where we had no regional overlaps sadly, my only exposure to other regions before I went to university was on holidays. Going to uni there was a choice of three (sub)regions depending on aerial position but the novelty was wearing off by then as there was less difference in programming.

I would hope even people here didn't pick their University based on ITV region

Oh no not at all what I meant, just that I went to a university in a town covered by three regions.

I lived between Hastings and London as a teenager, so had TVS and then Meridian, while if I was lucky, I'd see Thames/Carlton, but mainly LWT at the weekends.

OT slightly, but while I was down in Hastings, I saw the switch from Newsroom South East to South Today on BBC1, but left before SET launched.

In the dying days of the region's when this forum was around, it was always suggested that Border Scotland was a bit cobbled together and not set up as a proper region.

Although it does help if you are choosing ITV Region Studies.

I went to Birmingham University because it was the city where Crossroads was made, and my student flat was 2 minutes walk from Central Court in Gas Street.......... (Its also a highly regarded Russell Group university aswell.... but the lure of ATV was too much!)

WH Smith at Reading station used to sell the London, Midlands and South versions of the Radio Times.