The Very Early Telly Thread

On the ITN thread, we've somehow managed to turn it into a reverie on the delights of getting up really early when you were young to watch the telly start. To avoid derailing that thread still further I thought it might be more suitable in a thread of its own.

It's something those of us of a certain age think of fondly, I know Nick Hancock used to do a routine about it, saying you would watch as much telly as you could because you felt there was a finite amount of it and if you were lucky you could probably watch it all. I always tried to get up as early as I could when I was young because I was so terrified of missing anything interesting on the telly. In many ways it was the anticipation that was more fun than the programmes, so even when TVam was running from 6am on the weekends, I would still rather watch the test card and menu on BBC1. That's how much I didn't like TVam.

Saturday mornings on BBC1 in the late eighties and early nineties, the height of my telly obsession, only featured the test card and menu business in the winter, because for most of the year it would involve the Open University. I remember watching bits of that and being totally baffled, apart from a geometry course which I remember running which included an episode discussing the BBC1 COW globe.

As I said on the ITN thread, I had a telly in my own bedroom from when I was eight and I was far more excited to be able to watch more telly first thing in the morning than late at night. The only time I'd really annoy my parents would be on Christmas Day when my sister and I would get up at about 5am and have the telly on too loud to force our parents to get up. I also must have wound them up on holiday when I'd still do it, whether in a caravan with wafer thin walls or, on at least one New Year's Day, in the same hotel room.

No such problems at home, but I remember my dad once coming into my bedroom and telling me to go to sleep because somehow I'd imagined it was the morning and turned the telly on in my sleep when it was in fact midnight. I remember telling him I couldn't find any cartoons.

I didn't watch all the telly in my bedroom, mind. I remember when The 8.15 From Manchester was on I got in a routine of going into the living room, throwing out the previous week's Radio Times and making my own breakfast, all so I could be in front of the telly when it started. Must have made a right racket. Felt like a proper grown-up, though.

So, if anyone else has any happy memories about waiting for the telly to start, or switching it on far too early, "just in case" there was some kind of secret telly on, do please share them.

Being on holiday from school, Tuesday morning, Channel 4, 9.15am.
Good morning, IBA!

The engineering announcements (which is being discussed on this very board at the moment) rapidly became a special treat (even though some of the news contained flew right over my head at the time)

At first, it was something - rather like when you could hear the Police radio around 106fm on a normal FM radio - that you thought you shouldn't really be watching.

But once the exciting news that the Oxford transmitter would be on low power on Thursday morning between 8.45 - 11.30 leading to a poor signal for Channel 4, or that DevonAir was getting a new FM relay to improve the signal in the west of the broadcast area, that it started to draw you in.

And, it was actually the first time that I realised that there was another world that brought the pictures and sound to your television and radio, as well as the production involved in making it in the first place.

I always had the image of engineers, in TV rental shops (kids - ask your parents) up and down the country, scribbling notes, and drinking tea whilst watching it, before heading out to fix peoples televisions that had gone on the blink...

Before we had a VCR I recall getting up some Saturdays, to watch GMTV News, simply because the theme music had a remix to the weekday version, which I liked.

I'd then likely tolerate Eat Your Words for 10 minutes before going back to bed.

I'm guessing that was 93/94

I had a phase of getting up early to watch 4 Tel On View, when Channel 4 didn't start until 7.00am. And if the reception was clear I'd often see Sbectel from S4C, the music on that was often more funky than that of Channel 4.

When we got Cable installed I often got up early to see any hand overs or closedowns, which did often occur around 6am.

Oh and seeing normal ITV before 6am I considered a novelty.

Oh this is what ITV is like before GMTV starts...

I used to watch OU programmes quite regularly. Some were utterly baffling, some really uninteresting (to me anyway), some were more understandable the further I went through school. I particularly recall one maths programme about a formula for describing A size paper (in that when A0 is folded over it becomes A1, then over again to become A2, then A3, A4 etc, but what was the height in one size becomes the width in the next etc). Much more complex that you first think. Istr they devoted a whole 25 minutes to this...

OU programmes were transmitted from a self op tx suite at the very back of the presentation area. The announcers used to load the U-Matic tapes, introduce and run them, filling the gaps with slides, music and the OU Clock. It was possible to run OU programmes on both BBC 1 and 2 simultaneously. The suite was still (just about) in existence when I started in presentation in the mid 1990s and had last been used for transmission of BBC Select. It was quite exciting to visit a room whose output I had avidly watched while growing up. Same went for the Broom-cupboard. You can see both in action here:

For a while on Ch4 I and others in the house would get up and watch "I love Lucy" which went out around 06.15am I think there was also Space cats on afterwards.

I used to get up to watch the ITN Morning News with the volume low as not to wake up my parents and The Flintstones on BBC1.

As late as 1998/early 1999, BBC Two still featured the testcard in the early mornings, and channels such as UK Gold would start up around 6/7am, showing a menu until the first programme. Even Sky One used to just show music videos for most of the night.

Right into the early noughties Channel 4 would unofficially "start up" every morning, showing a menu of that night's programmes with music over the top for several minutes - something that seemed fairly archaic by then. Anyone know when that was finally dropped?

Originally UK Gold went through quite a long start up sequence like this 1995 example



A few years later and UK TV happened. The startup became very similar to how the BBC channels opened up - perhaps unsurprisingly as it was played out from TVC and the rest of the pres was similar to the BBC house style.



A couple of other memories - seeing a black screen with the letters OU in the top right or sometimes top left corner. Was this used to ident the two outputs of OU Con so they were routed to the right networks?

I also remember seeing the ETP-1 test card on ITV before TV-AM started with a simple "IBA" ledgend on it rather than the usual "IBA-CH4"

ETP-1 made its first appearance on ITV Rowridge in 1979, I wonder whether those early tests were made
with the crate still at Crawley Court, and the signal sent to Rowridge over the IBA's SHF link ? (see the current IBA Engineering thread for further details)

Some info about the test 'card' here :-

http://www.pembers.freeserve.co.uk/Test-Cards/Test-Card-Technical.html#ETP1

I do have a colour A4 datasheet on the test card, that I requested by sending an SAE to Crawley Court

I have a vague memory of seeing LWT start in the morning. Until I found an example on YouTube (below) it was like one of those repressed scary childhood memories of the IBA logo, test patterns and that odd number that popped up at the beginning of Sesame Street didn't help.


Sesame Street was odd as a child. Not only was there that number, there was the odd faded film converted to NTSC color that made up the titles and in parts indecipherable theme tune (a-ok?). Everything looked different, even the kids, it was unlike anything on 'proper' childrens TV.

Very interesting to see that uk gold startup, which includes an opt out for Cable and Wireless, which I don't think I've actually seen off air before. It doesn't quite fill the opt properly, which bearing in mind how it was triggered hardly surprises me. ISTR it was triggered by sending a pulse (in line 20?) of the VBI and if there were any opts scheduled local cable head ends would opt out and switch back after they'd played their ads, trails etc. All a bit low tech, though surprisingly common, and certainly was still a thing when playout of uktv moved to the Broadcast Centre I believe.

The BBC House Style is extremely evident here, with Gill Sans, centre justified for the menu, bold font for times, normal font for programme names etc.

Also note the cock up in the wrong announcement into Crossroads. They were all played off minidisc I seem to remember. I think they were triggered by the automation, but only "play the next track". If the annos were on the disc in the wrong order, or the disc was cued at the wrong point, the wrong Anno would go out.