ITV Network

How did that work? Did each individual region buy the series or was it bought by the ITV Network and distributed by them to the regions?

Also with Home and Away although it was an import the same episode went out each day in each region just at different times, so how did that work?

Well it's all very interesting really -- and I am wondering something.

When frontcaps were used, in regions which decided not to have IVC [Yorkshire?] what happened when they showed one of their own networked programmes?

While other regions had, say a 10sec local junction and then a 5sec [or whatever] Yorkshire frontcap, is it simply the case that Yorkshire had a 15sec local junction?

This may not have been the standard practice, but I've seen old YTV junctions where the YTV programme (including ident) was preceded by an announcer VO over slide for the programme.

Most stations had it as a late night programme and originally included it in their night time service (although later it typically became the last programme of the day *before* whatever night time feed they took cut in), but Tyne Tees started running it years before anyone else (I've heard 1984 mentioned. Although I don't know, I'd imagine that Tyne Tees originally imported it for themselves, but later in the 80's it was aquired for the whole network to use in their night time service. With Prisoner, there were also variations to the same individual episodes made locally. Central tidied up the poorly edited credits (or did in the early episodes at least), whilst Grampian and Westcountry both made different cuts to the slightly longer final episode to bring it down to standard length.


Aswell as the evening time varying, Westcountry repeated the previous day's episode in a lunchtime slot, in the same way as BBC1 do with Neighbours. Was it standard practice to do this over all the regions?


A problem here is that people tend to take the terms 'frontcap' and 'ident' as meaning the same thing; i.e. many people will refer to the mid-80's YTV 'liquid gold' frontcap as being their 'ident', when it's not. Their ident at the time was a CG rotating chevron which is now often forgotten about. Therefore, they could make an announcement over their ident and still run the programme with it's frontcap. However, it was uncommon for this to happen, their own programmes were usually announced over slides. Similarly, Central were quite happily doing early work with their 'cake' idents in the mid-80's, whilst still using the 'MKII moon' animation as their frontcap.

Also, although TVS and LWT had idents and frontcaps which were very similar in the mid-80's, Thames is the only station I can think of which ever used the same piece of footage for both an ident and a frontcap, but IIRC they only started using the skyline as an ident *after* network frontcaps were abolished.

Quite a seperate issue to what's been discussed here, but the ITV Network Centre only came into being as a result of the Broadcasting Act 1990 (and against the wishes of the big ITV companies) - its' purpose was (and officially still is) to commission the programmes independent of any one ITV company (before that, the ITVA Programme Controllers Committee, run by the Big 5, commissioned and scheduled the programmes).

The ITV Network Centre has never had responsiblity for the network feed though, and it seems to have been run by LNN (or whatever its' called now) for quite a while.

Indeed, the network centre has never had any technical role in transmitting or distributing ITV. It's administrative

A very interesting thread indeed, so back in the olden days, say if Family Fortunes was going to be broadcast on the network, are u saying that Central TV sent a feed down to London who then sent the feed over to everybody, or would it have come from Central themselves feeding it direct to the ITV companies?

Did each company have the capability to send out their networked programmes on the ITV network, or was it sent down the line to London?

Of course if it was going to London, who was in charge of the network feed previous to LNN?

> Also, although TVS and LWT had idents and frontcaps which were very similar in the mid-80's, Thames is the only station I can think of which ever used the same piece of footage for both an ident and a frontcap, but IIRC they only started using the skyline as an ident *after* network frontcaps were abolished.

Not quite.

Thames used the frontcap as an ident as early as 1976, and possibly a lot earlier, but AIUI they would generally only use it before the news. This can be heard on a '76 edition of "Man About The House", where the Thames ident is used with voiceover into "News At Ten".

And Thames are not the only company to have used their ident in this way. Tyne Tees were doing the exact same thing for as far back as I can remember (which'll be around 1977). The frontcap was used in a totally unedited form as an ident, usually only used before the news and generally curtain-wiped to the TTTV clock at the end just after the anno said something along the lines of "serving the North of England this is Tyne Tees Television". Before other programming they'd use either IVC, or a static slide of the formed-up ident (and never anything else). The slide was used more commonly after frontcaps were axed in 1988. Sometimes they'd just crash straight into the programme as well as ITV1 do now with the local news.

YTV would generally use slides before all programming bar the news with voiceover, followed by the company frontcap. This practice was abandoned around 1985/86 when they switched to the CGI rotating Y thing before all programmes *apart from their own*. On YTV productions the old slide system was kept. I don't recall them ever crashing into programmes pre-1993.

> Did each company have the capability to send out their networked programmes on the ITV network, or was it sent down the line to London?

They all sent to London but the bit I'm still not 100% sure about is the exact arrangement each station had.

Sometimes programmes were part-networked. Examples being the Tiswas/Southern split (where TTTV went their own way and made their own programmes) and the various Night-Time programmes in the early 90s.

Either each ITV company had more than one line they could select, or the PO tower had 15 separate feed lines (one for each region), each of which could be set to the output line of any other region. I would guess that the latter is the approach taken, where the switch would presumably be made at PO tower.

Each company (although there were exceptions at times - Channel TV for example) played out their own programmes onto the ITV network, but they didn't go via London.

So when Central played a programme it would go via the network to all the other stations who then cut it to air - i.e. it went (directly or indirectly) to Leeds, Manchester, Cardiff, Bristol, London, Norwich etc.

As an aside, one curious practice by YTV from 1993-95 was playing out Yorkshire/Tyne Tees programmes completely separately from the rest of the network.

TTTV's output would vary by several seconds in some cases in either direction from YTV's, which in turn would differ from the rest of the network. Only on programmes produced by the group.

The only conclusion I could come up with at the time (TTTV's staff had no idea what Leeds were doing) was that they were playing the locally-generated programmes on entirely separate tapes from the rest of the network, so they must have had two or even three separate copies of everything playing out simultaneously, and being cued by hand as they varied in time so much.

It baffled me at the time and I still haven't quite worked it out. I noticed it one day flicking between YTV and TTTV.

So each region had a link onto the network, so when it's their turn, they would turn the switch on to GPO, so everyone could receive the feed?