What was your favorite regional ITV station growing up?

Up to my late teens, so without leaving home, there'd been some choice of ITV although not all at the same time.

Granada - it was cool, had that big-city station feel,, and it buzzed of trendy big-city Manchester
ABC - obviously the Didsbury rather than the Teddington version, but entertainment rich.
Anglia - even though geographically far off, it felt local. It even cared about things outside big cities.
Yorkshire - was fine as an alternative, but dull as the main station.
Tyne-Tees - surprised that I could even get it, alas adjacent channel to BBC2 Belmont.

Nominate a winner - naturally no real choice Anglia.

Grew up in Grampian region, but my favourite was Scottish TV as it was known then.

My first experience of Scottish was back in 1996 was when Grampian had to switch over to them as North Tonight had fell off air and we got the rest of Scotland Today.

1:40. The A38 busier than it is at present!

Anyway, over the years, between 1970 and 1993 I got to see every ITV region one way or another, I think overall I liked Granada's pres the most

HTV Wales!

Used to watch Central as well whilst visiting relatives.

It's got to be Granada because it's the region I live in, plus there was always something about going to Manchester as a kid and seeing GRANADA TV up in neon lights across the City, I think Peter Kay called it the Hollywood of the north.

I think it helped going to Granada Studios when I was only young, I still wonder how that train got round the bend on this Ident

I was always frustrated with Granada. It’s presentation was professional, safe and honestly a bit dull. Its in-vision announcers were great, especially Colin Weston, but the idents and trails were just a bit boring.

We used to go on holiday to the South coast and was amazed at the glossy, faster, more showbiz, loud and bright TVS and later Meridian.

Living in the South, for me TVS started out stylish, but ended up a bit tacky

Or ITV Be

In the 80s, we used to holiday in Skegness, and for some reason, I couldn't warm to Yorkshire Television's presentation. But, in 1991, we went to Whitley Bay on holiday, and I enjoyed Tyne Tees presentation. It's connected TTTV logo looked, to me as an 11 year old, to be happy and smiling.

As an aside, that 1991 holiday to Whitley Bay, was the first time I ever saw a break bumper as well!

Westcountry for me. Presentation that would still look and sound good today - it was stylish and yet flexible enough to reflect the seasons or embrace them for major events. The Westcountry Life clips celebrated the identity of the south west though short clips of local people doing what they do.

Thames was quite minimalist, possibly even stilted, in its style and presentation around 1990ish but made up for it as a massive producer of networked programmes. However, one could argue that there was a certain beauty and elegance to its minimalism.

TVS started up in the morning with a short film showing scenes from the south east with its signature tune thundering in the background whereas Thames started up just with its jingle, but did it really need anything more than this? There where times when I thought that the new 3D jingle used in 1992 was over the top and even slightly tacky.

In contrast, LWT was bold and brash.



It was all about contrast. Southern appeared to design its presentation for black and white TVs, then TVS treated viewers with a spectrum of colours. The facelifted TVS in 1987 was very slick and glitzy for its time.

At the discussion about the best and worst ITV companies, HTV came off quite bad as well. It's presentation looked 1970s and there also appeared to be more IVC than with other ITV regions. It also wasn't a significant player when it came to networked programmes.

@Riaz, so basically you dislike small ITV companies because they were, erm, small.

You do realise that the smaller companies found it almost impossible to get its programme ideas to network due to the stitching up of the system by the big five? Also once you got below around four million viewers the fixed costs of running a company essentially prevented the smaller stations from being able to fund all that much.

If you want to pinpoint an ITV company which for most of its existence had very weak presentation relative to its size, Granada has to be up there.

For most of its existence it had pres that looked like Border on a bad day, then going into the 1990s its idea of polishing its branding up was to add the most perfunctory "animation" to its ident, and basically steal the jingle from, of all things, the 1986 IBA ident.

And the less said about the 1996 Granada Tonight, cribbed from some awful American graphics package, the better really.

But then they made up for it in other areas.