Fred Dinenage and ITV How

Incidentally, Southern Television did not sell its network archive when it lost its franchise. It actually continued holding and exploiting the rights independently until 1988 when it was bought by Primetime, which ten years later was bought by Southern Star. I once saw an email from Southern Star claiming they only held Southern Television material deemed saleable internationally and they hold no black and white footage.

Local as in local news and current affairs. The 3 stations in the south sold on their news archives to their successors as there's not much else that can be done with them and little resale value. Something like How wouldn't have been included in that, I doubt the original series even still existed in 1982

The same happened with ATV/Central.

Makes sense, why would they want anything not saleable?

The BFI hold Southerns paperwork archive, apparently its the only complete set of paperwork existing from an ITV company, although it's not catalogued yet:
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FI023996%2F1

There are certainly a broad range of Southern programmes in the WFSA archive, not just news/current affairs, so who knows. But I agree its likely that early How hasn't survived unless it's in someone's private collection. We'd have surely seen a clip of it by now.

I do wonder if TVS had to get any sort of permission from the rights holder of How in order to produce How 2.

EDIT: Nothing in the credits for the TVS series but in much later Scottish TV series the format is credited to Southern Star.

I guess that makes sense considering Southern continue to manage its archive for a good few years after losing its franchise. I imagine Thames' archive is pretty in tact too.

Unless it was given to an archive like the BFI it's unlikely.

Thames continued as an active TV company after it went off air rather than what happened to Southern of ending up just as a company with a lot of film, tapes and documentation.

I'd have thought Thames would have kept anything for as long as they were needed/obliged to and then junked it as any company would. They moved out of both Euston and Teddington in the next 7 years so had 2 chances for a clear out. Fremantle won't be sitting on a load of documentation of when it was an ITV company, unless It's HR records of any remaining staff. That is of course except for paperwork concerning their programme archive.


Incidently, Thames had storage space near Teddington Studios, I know that was being cleared out in about 1994. Some of my friends got a work experience placement with them, but instead of anything exciting like making programmes they were clearing out the warehouse. The main thing they said that was skipped was a load of animation cells from their Cosgrove Hall productions. One of my them was wise enough to liberate a few and years later gradually released them on Ebay

In fact I've got some scripts of a famous Thames show that I rescued from a skip at Teddington when I worked there

Sorry for going off topic

Going back on topic, this video from How 2 explains the backstory behind the How hand gesture:

A not entirely accurate explanation of the "How" greeting.

Possibly some artistic licence being used with the 'letters of complaint' too? How likely would episode 1 have gone out before they recorded episode 6?

It aired once a week, so was it made at the same pace, no more than a month in advance? If so, it is possible.

Obviously it's possible, but would they really shoot one a week, close to transmission? Seems unlikely for that sort of show.

Its not unheard of to record a series of something that generates loads of complaints about something on it and go back and change the offending item (as happened with the new "intense" clock music on Countdown in 1996, though it wasn't referenced on air IIRC).

Could be artistic licence for How 2, but equally could have been dropped in as a pick-up filmed insert weeks later. Soaps are good at rapidly turning round rapid inserts so it could have been done here, albeit not a priority for a Children's ITV programme but...

The press release said it would be simulcast on ITV. I wonder what slot this will be in? Saturday mornings perhaps?