The Gay Byrne Irish Television Thread

I watched Winning Streak with it's new look tonight on RTÉ One.

I'm very happy with what the National Lottery have done to the show; it has been given a new lease of life for the players and viewers watching it at home & it looks excellent. The previous format of Winning Streak did look dated before this remake. It needed to be freshened up after a while as things did become quite stale after a while.

The new features of the show, graphics wise, are the new titles & new graphics for the games including new red boxes with white text provided for Electric Dreams, Roll for Riches, Play or Pay, the National Lottery good causes segment & High Low Share.

Roll for Riches has new graphics included for the prizes from €10k up to €50k. It was a very familiar game that was used at the end of The Big Money Game every Saturday night during the lottery show season in the summer. The players had to roll the balls down the balldron to reveal the winning prize shown in a daisy pattern. The ball in the middle of the pattern was what they won from the game.

Play or Pay has brand new graphics which displays all of the cash prizes on the side of the screen from €10k all the way up to €30k. There is a new endboard graphic displayed on screen when the players amounts are shown after most the games are completed in the first part of the show & after High Low Share. There is also a new graphic showing a car coming into it on the screen when the players win it in Electric Dreams & when the players amounts are shown on the new endboard twice during the show.

Patience has also been tweaked for the player. The cash amounts are displayed in a new honeycomb board. No computer screens are in use in this refreshed version. The prizes in it are unchanged from the last few seasons when the old fantastic five format was included in the previous format of the show. But Marty & Sinead have to stay either beside the player to ask whatever number is chosen by the player & one of them then opens one of the selected doors to reveal the cash prize.

High Low Share also has little presentation tweaks added to the game. The carousel used in the game from before is still there. When you look at the numbers on the stand beside the presenter; it's no longer a flipboard. It looks like either a piece of plastic or glass when all of the numbers on it covered in a light blue object on the carousel. Marty or Sinead have to stand beside the player each week when the numbers are selected from the carousel. It looks very cramped for the players when they have to do that. They had a lot more space to make their selection when they did pick something when in their old set. I don't know if High Low Share will be included from the next series in the new year. It did look quite awkward this time when looking at the presentation of the game at home on the TV. If the National Lottery had decided to get rid of High Low share by then; I wouldn't miss it as it had a good run.

There is another tweak to the format that was included when the big wheel was being spun by the gentleman when it comes near the end of the show. And new tweak to the wheel is there will be an additional €100,000 segment added to it every week if a prize over that amount was not won by the player who won the Wheel Reveal on the night. That won't happen until next week's show.

Also a few questions here about the audience seats in the new set? Were the new coloured neon lights how fitted in between the audience seats included as a feature when Mike Murphy presented the first series of Winning Streak on RTÉ? The light display was definitely a bigger feature that was included on his first series. The seating arrangements for the players were also located in front of the audience looked very similar to it as well. It is like going back to an older era when the show was in it's infancy on RTÉ's airwaves.

My favourite game from the new look Winning Streak is the briefcase game called Play or Pay. That new game looks great to play while winning a real decent amount of money even though it doesn't have bigger amounts of money higher than €30k. It is sort of looks a near direct copy from the international or U.S. format of Deal or No Deal when you look at that part of it on Winning Streak.

That happened in Derek Mooney's time, too.

What’s very striking about that image is how different UTV and HTV’s listings are. Only news programmes and one prime time drama aired simultaneously.

I always wondered why we got listings for HTV. Back then I thought it was so random but makes sense now that there's overspill from wales. Amazing how far signals can go.

Not that there's anything between Wales and Ireland to stop the signals!

I know people in Arklow, County Wicklow had a great reception of the UK channels. A lot of people from Dublin to Waterford pointed their aerials out over the Irish sea, and as analogue was not an all or nothing signal like DTT is now, you could pick up a reasonable signal of BBC and ITV. This meant people living in Arklow, County Wicklow say in 1977 could receive RTE Television, BBC 1 Wales, BBC 2 Wales and HTV Wales, meaning they have four channels, whereas us in Britain had just three.

Not TV related, but on a really clear day you can see the Wicklow Mountains from Snowdonia (and vice versa).

Not TV related again, but I was driving through Caernarfon a couple of weeks ago alongside the coast, I could very easily pick up RTÉ Radio 1 and 2FM clearly in my car, for some distance. But that's for another thread...

There was a story about people living in the Scilly Isles, who could not receive any of the UK channels, due hills and mountains blocking their signal, however they could receive a perfect RTE 1 and RTE 2 signal from Ireland over the Irish sea. This was in 1985. So this meant they relied on Irish television. They could still receive all the UK radio stations. Wow.

HTV and S4C were carried on analogue cable (and by UHF transmission stations) some areas, particularly in the east and southeast, up until DSO. But in the era that image dates from, HTV was more widely carried - afaik it was dropped in favour of Channel 4 in most places that also carried UTV, once C4 launched.

There are no hills and mountains on the Scilly Islands !

The islands have had their own FM and TV transmitter since 1969.

http://tx.mb21.co.uk/gallery/gallerypage.php?txid=211&pageid=646

Sounds like an island myth, though I wouldn't be surprised if you can receive Irish transmissions there,
I spent some time in Cornwall and RTE Radio from Mt Leinster was quite easy.

Car radio reception of RTE radio stations all along the Cardigan Bay coast in Wales is very easy. The RDS flips you between Mt Leinster and Kippure

[quote="mr_vivian" pid="1132980"]

On the Cable network in my part of Dublin we had HTV until November 1st 1982 .

We lost it the next day for some reason