ITV returns: 24 Oct 1979

If you look carefully, you'll see some of the commercial breaks marked SOF (Sound on film), KART (videotape cartridge) and ANN/SL (Announcer voiceover slide). I had several of these (also in centre breaks which I haven't shown). I spoke over the clock into the news, and then in vision at the end of the evening ( Studio E was the presentation studio in vision).

My exact words were: "And finally a reminder to switch off and unplug your television set for safety's sake."

Was local radio 24 hour broadcasting around this time?

Did ATV make an appearance at this point as well, apart from their programmes? (I only vaguely remember their programmes appearing on the first night back!)

Your list suggests ATV et all piped the programmes through to Thames, so presumbly there was someone locally pushing the 'Play' button?

If not, I presume ATV continuity returned the next night? (Local news came back the day after didn't it?)

"N/W V/O E/C"

Can you confirm what all of these mean? I'm thinking mainly of the E/C.....

Only the large city stations, Capital, LBC, BRMB, City, Piccadilly, Metro, and Clyde. Possibly also Hallam and Forth too by then ?

Umm voice over end credits? Did they even do that then?

Ah right....... Never even occurred to me that, seeing as, as you say, they did not tend to provide voice-overs over end-credits unless it was a special announcement (next programme on in two weeks, congratulating a locally-based gameshow contestant etc).

I suppose with the schedule being all over the place there would be more of a need, but after virtually every programme?

N/W V/O E/C = Networked voiceover end credits. (But you knew that, didn't you?)
Because we'd been off for 12 weeks, there was no TV Times and most viewers hadn;' a clue what the emergency schedule was, it was necessary to do holders over the end credits pointing what was coming next. As the ACTT members had only just returned to work, there hadn't been enough time to make slides. Remember in those days we didn't use electronic captions, so a graphic was laboriously made up using Letraset, photographs and bits of cardboard, then a photograph was taken and that was turned into a 35mm slide. On this night, almost all the continuity was originated at Thames to simplify matters. When I did make my return in vision at closedown, the picture was abysmal because nobody had lined-up the camera. Normal local continuity resumed the following day. Daytime was taken up with a caption with details of when schools programmes would return, (the following Monday) and showing a schools menu. I seem to remember that Grampian originated that because they and STV had a different schools schedule to the network one.

To reply to another question: although routed via Thames, the programmes from ATV, YTV and Granada came from the VT areas in these places.

We didn't trail Radio Clyde programmes at closedown because that was done by the IBA from the Black Hill transmitter after closedown. The IBA would switch to a local slide scanner and show a slide with the Radio Clyde frequencies on it (I still have the slide!) and run a cart with an announcement. The voice was mine, however, which probably confused anyone trying to work out where it came from!

This slide ?

http://txlib.mb21.co.uk/v/iba-slides/LocalRadio2t.jpg.html

IBA Black Hill Control Room shot:-

http://tx.mb21.co.uk/features/blackhill/index.shtml

I wonder if the reason for that was because someone at Carlisle had forgotten to put the necessary 50p in the meter to allow them to broadcast that night's programmes.

That's the very one! Colin Dalziel (who provided the slide to Mike Brown) has been a chum of mine since we were teenagers, and I used to nip up to Black Hill to see him from time to time. I made a video once illustrating what went on at the ROC (Regional Operation Control) at Black Hill, where the duty man monitored the outputs of STV, Grampian, Border and Ulster. Tried to find the tape over the weekend but it seems to have lost itself in a huge pile of rotting VHS boxes!