What was your favorite regional ITV station growing up?

I imagine the latter is the case, and the Newcastle number is the company’s regional office. Nowadays it would probably have a non-geographic number.

I would think that the Border region would be a hot spot, for regional adverts being shown, out of area. Serving southern Scotland, I would think it was likely that adverts for shops, attractions etc, in Ayr, Edinburgh, Glasgow, all in STV area, would be shown. As for serving North Northumberland, and Cumbria, there's adverts for Granada on youtube, with one for a theme park in Morecambe. I wouldn't be surprised if that also appeared on Border, as would adverts for the Metrocentre, given Border served north Northumberland.

Did Border when playout moved to Leeds carry separate ads for Scotland and England? It certainly had opt out programmes for the two areas, after they added a Scotland frequency at Caldbeck?

Dorset is divided county. I believe that Blandford Forum is officially in HTV West territory but TVS / Meridian was more popular back in the 1990s.

Blandford sounds the perfect location for the TVS archive - has anyone checked?

South Somerset (East) is mainly West Yeovil is half and half dependent on hills and south Somerset (west) is mainly South West.

West of Weymouth is SW, East of Dorchester is South except Sherborne which is SW.

You can also get Welsh channels in South Somerset.

Which ITV region was most popular in Aylesbury?

Which ITV company had the best continuity studio background? STV had a pleasing cream colour with their thistle ident, back in the 1980s. The 1991 Tyne Tees stripes IVC studio background was a bit moody and dark. That said, it would've been suitable in the evenings.

I think there is a video on YouTube somewhere of Granada Reports from about 2003 where the top story was something happening in Rhyl. Can’t find it now though. I think Rhyl was officially in the Granada/HTV area. I believe that in the very early days of Granada (before WWN started), they even carried some Welsh language programming.

There were no official boundaries from what I can discern. An ITV company's area was determined by its transmitter footprint. Granada could be seen in much of North Wales and so Granada covered it. I remember all those on location things Paul Crone used to do for Granada Tonight in the late 90s. Places like Rhyl were often chosen.

There is a strong argument for saying that an ITV station should concentrate on its overlap areas more than the official patch, especially in the days when they had an effective monopoly on advertising. These areas, especially where there is a sizeable overlap (such as North Wales or North Yorkshire) represented the only places where there was genuine competition for revenue, so if you could persuade viewers to switch, there's immediate extra cash.

No-one was ever going to get a new aerial so they could see Jim Pope introducing Coronation Street instead of Margaret Pritchard so your local news was the obvious place to pile the pressure on.

There were overlap regions and viewers in them may have overwhelmingly preferred one region over another. There were probably many localities where viewers overwhelmingly preferred to watch region X whereas management at region Y believed that they were watching region Y.