MA
Oh no, not a 'single person'. We're talking about a time when the Unions were still strong and playing out commercials required quite a team. At the very least, a telecine operator (at those stations still using film for some of the commercials), a VT operator (yes, some stations were using cart playout but these were so unreliable that they still required a full time operator to watch the tapes being chewed up and the compressed air line failing.......), a Transmission Controller and a CTA person. Channel 4 would have gone through its own control room, so adding ITV would require at the very least an additional Transmission Controller to be on duty in the ITV Control Room.
Channel 4 itself could have been operated by one man at an ITV station. C4's IDENT system gave out a number of cues to operate external equipment, including a standby cue, cue a fade in or out of a break to a mixer, and a 'run' command for any external equipment such as a VT. Given the era, the cart/cassette machines only had a capacity of 22 or 24 carts and so they had to be regularly changed over the course of an evening otherwise there would have been a very limited selection of commercials- that's what the one man would be doing and he would be programming the machine to play the right comms in the right order. But I don't know of any station that ran C4 in this way, but it was possible technically. In London, C4 could see 'their' complete presentation output off-air and so Thames and LWT felt the need to keep standards up, up country you could have gotten away with murder and they'd have known nothing about it.
Thinking about it, that one notional engineer on C4 commercial duties would also have had to liaise with the local Transmitter staff as it was necessary to agree a random selection of video and sound gradings on individual programmes - the random selection being made by the TX engineer, just as it was on ITV (at the time).
I've heard stories of the operators inserting C4 comms struggling to stay awake in the early 80s on the programming put out after midnight. Not true I'm sure !
Well no, on those occasions those employed to be putting the ads out on 4 (probably a single person I'm each region) were doing that, I don't think adding the duties of running ITV as well would have been considered
Oh no, not a 'single person'. We're talking about a time when the Unions were still strong and playing out commercials required quite a team. At the very least, a telecine operator (at those stations still using film for some of the commercials), a VT operator (yes, some stations were using cart playout but these were so unreliable that they still required a full time operator to watch the tapes being chewed up and the compressed air line failing.......), a Transmission Controller and a CTA person. Channel 4 would have gone through its own control room, so adding ITV would require at the very least an additional Transmission Controller to be on duty in the ITV Control Room.
Channel 4 itself could have been operated by one man at an ITV station. C4's IDENT system gave out a number of cues to operate external equipment, including a standby cue, cue a fade in or out of a break to a mixer, and a 'run' command for any external equipment such as a VT. Given the era, the cart/cassette machines only had a capacity of 22 or 24 carts and so they had to be regularly changed over the course of an evening otherwise there would have been a very limited selection of commercials- that's what the one man would be doing and he would be programming the machine to play the right comms in the right order. But I don't know of any station that ran C4 in this way, but it was possible technically. In London, C4 could see 'their' complete presentation output off-air and so Thames and LWT felt the need to keep standards up, up country you could have gotten away with murder and they'd have known nothing about it.
Thinking about it, that one notional engineer on C4 commercial duties would also have had to liaise with the local Transmitter staff as it was necessary to agree a random selection of video and sound gradings on individual programmes - the random selection being made by the TX engineer, just as it was on ITV (at the time).
I've heard stories of the operators inserting C4 comms struggling to stay awake in the early 80s on the programming put out after midnight. Not true I'm sure !