Good Morning Britain

I think in 1992, when TV-am was months away from closing, they just gave ITV their airtime for Telethon '92.

It was the only day TVAM didn't broadcast.

My memory may be playing tricks on me here, but when TV-am originally started in 1983, didn't its broadcast hours end at 9:15, and an IBA caption appeared to advise that "programmes start at 9:30"? It was only later changed to the rather clunky switchover at 9:25.

I have old copies of TV Times in the loft (including the launch edition for TV-am), so I may have to go and dig that out if nobody can confirm this.

I can confirm that one

Yes, and the Tuesday IBA Engineering News prog was shoehorned into that gap too, as well as being simulcast on C4/S4C. A few months later when the gap was closed, IBA Eng News remained just on 4

This was in October 1985 when they played a World Cup qualifier against Australia which kicked off at 8.30am, and as you say, it was broadcast on Channel 4 rather than ITV (it presumably would have been networked if ITV had shown it, it was a play-off). But those were the days when C4 was very much ITV2, and maybe they would always have shown it there because they thought TVam was more important, much like how the Beeb would show matches on BBC2 to avoid moving the news.



I think that "24 hours" suggestion is just a figure of speech and while it was on air for 24 hours, it wasn't continuously. The first Thames Telethon in 1980 certainly wasn't continuous because they had to go off for schools programmes, which I think was also the case here.

The other interesting thing about that 1985 Thames Telethon is that as they were doing their own thing, they sent the final part of a mini-series to Central to allow them to play it out to all the other regions (and they showed it some other night). Unfortunately somewhere along the way to Central they lost one of the reels and it ended twenty minutes early.

As I mentioned, heavens, eight years ago, in 1988 TVam had nothing at all to do with the Telethon because the unions said they'd boycott the whole thing if they were allowed to take part during the strike. I don't know if that meant they still switched to TV-am and they sold the adverts within that part of the show, or the various regions just carried on, but they didn't make anything for it. In 1992 they did contribute, they had an hour between 6.30 and 7.30 which was a "special" edition of Michaela Strachan's usual show which just linked cartoons together. I assume that was just treated as another contribution to the show like all the other bits, as mentioned in 1992 the main kids' bit was The Disney Club (which I'm pretty sure was pre-recorded) and that came from STV. Indeed I can remember they still had the local number on the screen during the Michaela bit so presumably it was still being broadcast from the regions rather than TV-am.

There’s not much of the Thames Telethon if anything lying about online. I’ve managed to find a TV Times listing (from eBay) which shows the Telethon being listed from 7.30pm to 6.15am, for it only to stop for News At Ten. Whether TV-am did broadcast the following morning remains a mystery.



With regards to the 1988 Telethon, there’s a listing on twitter which will probably resurface at the end of next month which all but confirms that TV-am wasn’t shown. More so that there’s an ITN Summary at 8.00am. Good job it was for a good cause.

Well, TVam were starting at 6.15 in those days, so presumably it was. And the date confirms that it would have had to stop for schools programmes as well.

In those days pre-1993, wouldn't TV-am have been in control of C4 in that 0600-0925 period certainly in terms of ad revenue like the ITV regional companies were the rest of the day?

None of the ITV companies were ever 'in control' of C4, all they did were to insert the ads, (and in return they had to pay for C4's running costs). TV-am were not involved in that arrangement (i.e they didn't contribute towards C4) until May 1989 and The Channel 4 Daily came along.

I do recall the football match, it was an STV production for C4. I can't remember whether or not there were any ad breaks in it, probably if there were, there were none before 09:25 ?

I don’t think schools programmes were shown in London that morning - but it was half-term repeat week so perhaps schools in the capital were on holiday (I was normally back at school that week having had the previous week off). I think they only stopped for ITN and, as mentioned above, TVam.

EDIT: Wikipedia gives the date of the Thames Telethon as 23rd October 1985, but I’m sure it was actually the following week - 29th-30th October 1985.

Regarding the Channel Four Daily, did TVam insert the ad breaks? Obviously the regional stations couldn’t. I remember that during TVam we couldn’t get the local pages of Oracle, but at some point (and I think this was before 1993), this changed.

So TV-am took the advertising revenue from the early days of the Big Breakfast?