The Very Early Telly Thread

I must be a bit older I'd watch first hour of WCW for the Cruiserweights then decide if I wanted to watch WWF after.

Here's another Cartoon Network to TNT handover, from 1994. I remember this one in addition to the bouncing blocks. The transition is pretty seamless too! I don't think I've seen the TNT to CN handover from this period though.



Also, anyone remember when BBC2 Scotland would give us a sneaky showing of the Testcard with music late-90s/early-00s whenever their Learning Zone programming ended earlier than the network? Pretty similar to this closedown, but with Testcard F/J!

IIRC it's seamless because it was a single broadcast running 24hrs but the two "channels" timeshared, TNT 7pm-5am and Cartoon Network 5am-7pm. This was proved on occasion prior to both channels going 24hrs where TNT would get going but they'd left the Cartoon Network DOG on.

Yes that was how most of those shared channels worked, but of course in those days there was no Epg switch like BBC4 and Cbeebies do now

TNT and Cartoon Network were both Turner channels, Paramount and Nick both Viacom. UK living and TVX shared a transponder and had a seamless handover but had different owners - they came from the same TX suite with TVX paying for UK living to play it out


I don't know how channels like 11 on Sky analogue worked, which were shared between about 5 different channels a day

If that's the case, I wonder why it became less seamless by the time the bouncing blocks were used. That ident seemed to run for as long as necessary until TNT "took over" and waited on its holding slide before it was time to broadcast.

I suspect the change came once CN started 24 hour broadcasting on cable. Before then the same suite could play both out (TNT and Cartoon Network are both Turner companies) so it was just like the CBeebies to BBC Four transition. Once it was a 24 hour operation on some platforms, the shared version on other platforms would need to switch between the two, and would necessarily not be as slick.

Perhaps the ident was just a bit of elasticity in the schedule so that TNT could start at 19.00.00 on the nose? Even today you'll find channels have a fixed point in their schedules, and will sit on a long ident until the 'start of day', usually at 0600.

Channels didn't have fixed numbers on analogue. So saying Channel 11 is meaningless.

I think most followed the printed SKY Guide suggested channel numbers though.

Yep, there were defaults even though you could retune the receiver: here's the channel number line up in 1995 for example,including the busy ch11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Multichannels#1995_channel_list

Presumably as there was a 24 hour Cartoon Network too, there had to be a junction between that and the daytime only one which varied

You know.....it's taken me over 20 years to notice that the TNT transition is started by......a stick of TNT?