The Very Early Telly Thread

Oh my, there's SO much to love about that clip! The power inverter the size of a briefcase, the laptop and bubble jet printer that fills a four-seat table on a train, the start up sequence that couldn't be (a) more 90s and (b) more camp if it tried, The Sweeney (say no more) and Aspel era Give Us A Clue (also a programme highly ranked in the camp class if you ask me) with its bizarre use of what everyone knows as the Grange Hill theme "Chicken Man"

Tv heaven.

Plus the phrase "what's occurring" decades before Gavin and Stacey.

It would have been from Emley in the 80s when I saw it. Didn't the same piece of kit do the testcard and the generic blue apology caption?

Yes, in later years, I've got the ex Pontop Pike crate in my garage (with a broken PSU that I really must get going). The ETP-1 generator on that is a single module. The prototype ETP-1 generator was an entire crate I think.
They were standard IBA design frames. At Sony we had a couple of IBA noise measuring test sets, based on the same design.

I can't help thinking that there should have been an 0891 number overlaid on that UK Gold startup -

"Talk to metalworkers you'd like to meet..."

I had a TV in my room at an early age too connected up to 13 and 19.2E in the early to mid nineties. I have a very early memory of the 30's Flash Gordon serials on Saturday mornings. In my dad's infinite wisdom he wired me up with a satellite dish and decoder but never an analogue aerial so I can remember using the Test Card to get the best picture with my indoor aerial and where to put it down to before Flash Gordon started.

I also have fond memories of Paramount's closedown test card with the traffic jam and chicken.

Yours truly uploaded that clip. The only time I ever saw it was a weekend as Nick didn't start until 7am, where as on weekdays it started at 6am. That recording was pretty much the only time I saw it live.

On Paramount's teletext service on the list of Astra channels it was officially listed as Chicken Tonite...!

Who remembers the handover in the mornings from Quantum shopping channel to Eurosport?

Apparently that and the corresponding one at night were fairly complicated technically. The two channels came from different places (different countries in fact) and the up link sites were different too. Therefore the change over involved one earth station cutting their carrier and the other coming up on the same frequency all coordinated via a conference call between the up links, playouts and Astra.


Hence why on air there was normally a very brief burst of static at the change over point.

Why is it bizarre? I thought it was common knowledge Chicken Man was used in Give Us A Clue's early years, it was never unique to Grange Hill, though it lasted far longer on that than it did on GUAC, and it was never made for Grange Hill originally anyway.

That aside, the entire start-up of UK Gold makes sense to me now as I'd never seen the start-up sequence before from that era, only the UK Gold breakbumpers - it was part of the entire presentation package. Still looks fairly neat.

Also on the Paramount chicken test card thing - apart from being wonderfully surreal, I remember a version of that that had the test tone replaced with beeping car horns.

Reading this thread makes me pleased I wasn't the only person watching the more obscure channels start up at stupid o'clock in the morning in the late 1990's.