Favourite TV Closedowns and Handovers

The Cartoon Network to TNT handover was very simple as they were essentially the same channel for much of the 1990s. It became a little more complicated when both went 24 hours. The bouncing blocks filler was used on Cartoon Network analogue to avoid it abruptly cutting to TNT midway through a promo or advert.

The original switchover, until around 1998:

They had lots of promotion about how Cartoon Network was 24 hours on cable, though rather unfortunatly it was only on certain cable companies- ours didn't have it.

Also, anyone remember in 1999 when TNT Classic Movies became TCM, on the analogue timeshare we instead got a general entertainment version of TNT- that was now only on air for 4 hours until 1AM, and for whatever reason was never on digital. Rather unsuprisingly it didn't last long at all, and by the spring of 2000 they were back to showing TCM in that slot.

Oh, and nothing beats the old "AKA Cartoon Network" slot they had in the evenings for a large chunk of 1999. The "Cult Toons" show, which was old Hanna-Barbera toons mashed up with clips of other cartoons was hilarious. Shame it's not been repeated since.

And here is an example of it the other way round...

They probably weren't the only channels that timeshared on a transponder that come from completely different places either.

I think they were pretty unusual in that respect, most of the other channel shares were pretty seamless from what I remember.

I think it was unusual because unlike the others the two channels came from different countries, whereas Often, like Nick and Paramount or Cartoon and TNT they were from the same building. Channels like EBN or God TV that shared on one of Sky's slots would probably just have sent the output to Sky to switch onto the service, they wouldn't go to the expense of having their own TX just for a few hours a day

Here's a weird one, TCC's holding animation and station theme song hand over to Challenge at 5pm, via a few seconds of TV Travel Shop.

I think this may have been the era when TCC had closed down on satellite and Cable and Wireless were playing out old tapes themselves.

We can't have a thread about handovers without mentioning the classic Thames to LWT then back to Thames for the news

Always had a soft spot for Central's last closedown routine:

Interesting trailer - Cartoon Network wasn't 24 hours on cable on Diamond Cable (Nottingham based) until ntl: digital TV arrived in about 2000/2001. In fact, the analogue cable version was still handing over (rather abruptly by this point) to TCM at 9pm until the service closed in 2009ish.

By the time sky analogue switched off, I presume the switch was done by physically changing a satellite box between channels.

It was me who recorded and uploaded the clip, and I can confirm that is correct. I believe the Nordic version was still running at this time (and I believed that we were watching this at the time) but the channel was played out by CWC. We had a couple of days where there was no TCC at all. This set up lasted about 6 months before CWC pulled the plug on it. The switch wasn’t as bad on TV, it’s more the reaction with the VCR that explains the jump.

The TCC thing was bizarre though, wasn't it? Didn't they just shut down one day without warning, even running a "see you tomorrow" trailer on the handover on the last day? And their website was still online for the best part of a decade.

And speaking of Cable & Wireless, I remember they used to cut into ad breaks on certain channels to run promotions for their own services, which I always found bizarre.