Good Morning Britain - the launch

Here in Meridian-land all that happened was the page header changed from 'Meridian' to 'GMTV' between 06:00 and 09:25, I don't think anything else changed ?

Yes: http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ancillary/gmtv.shtml

At one stage Granada Text appeared on weekdays and GMTV Text appeared on P600 on weekends for a while in the 1990's, I guess having regional news on weekdays had an effect there.

I seem to dimly recall that gmtv did not have macro regions in the very early days - is that correct? And of course it was all in PAL in the first incarnation of Lnn tx. All the outgoing lines were still controlled by lwt (ok, tls !) and in mcr there was a manual switch that switched the output of the circuits between lwt and gmtv.

Much of the teletext insertion was also performed in lwt mcr and various timer clocks were around to make sure things changed at the appropriate time. Not too well documented and a bit of a mystery most of the time! Talkback in teletext was also inserted, also remote switching signalling for the remote regions to insert their local news opts. I'm pretty sure there were 3 separate ancillary teletext inserters for Carlton, lwt and gmtv so surprised anyone upcountry would get the wrong service. I wish I could remember more, but too long ago to remember any real detail.

Here's a 1983 TV-AM to Central handover. After TV-AM finishes there's a caption with music, which somehow fades to black, then fades up to another version of the same caption with different music.



Presumably the first slide originates with TV-AM and the second version from Central, but how they managed to do a down and up is a bit of a mystery.

Ummm, it is ! During the first few months of TV-am, there was a gap between 09:15 and 09:25. This was because
BT had not upgraded all of their NSCs (national switching centres) with electronic A/V routers, so in some regions BT had to manually repatch the local ends from the ITV compnaies, and transmitters in and out of the national network feed coming in from London (which 05:30 to 09:25 carried TV-am)

During this gap blue IBA captions were shown in all regions (remember back then the IBA were the broadcaster) I've never been able to find out where these captions originated from, TV-am, the ITV companies, or the four IBA control centres (Croydon, Emley, St Hilary and Black Hill). Perhaps a mixture of all ?

Presumably in the regions where BT had electronic line switching the caption was more or less uninterrupted, in others subject to crashes and bangs while BT moved patch cables around !

By the end of the year, BT had got their act together, and TV-am broadcast right up to 09:24:59.

Bluecortina: Yes, I think you're right, the GMTV macros, were a product of LNN phase 2, the 16:9/SDI/Server based playout/Tx, I'm sure they didn't exist in the PAL phase. (Jan 93 to 1999). I only worked on the phase 2 system.

This is what I don't understand with that video. You would realistically expect, at the very least, a significant non-sync frame-roll, but you don't get one. I can only assume the kit was in place at Central to do a fairly easy switch.

One theory is that it was done in the style of a BBC soft-opt.

TV-AM put out the first caption, BT Birmingham send that to Central as well as to the TX. Central genlock to that and put it on their output. BT switch Central to the TX, they fade to black and then bring up their own slide scanner and music.

Susanna and Ben follow the crowd by taking the Ice Bucket Challenge:



Summer holidays are coming to a close here in Scotland, anyone have summer viewing figures?

I think 640-649 was reserved for GMTV everywhere, at all times as compensation for other regional pages continuing to be available during GMTV's hours.

I'm more than reasonably sure that the GMTV macros (perhaps not 4 initially) started in the pal days, not so long after they went on air in 1993. I never had much to do with LNN after the 'pal' days, so my recollections would definitely be before SDI etc. I tried to keep out of it as much as possible, lnn were very, very nice people to work with but had the terrible, terrible habit of modifying their installations without documenting what they had done.

Noticed this morning the ITV logo is on the right side of the screen.