Jobfinder

Something that was very of it’s time was Jobfinder. Although many regions had a version in the very early days of ITV Night Time when it consisted of not much more than teletext pages, I believe there was only Central and Yorkshire Tyne Tees that kept it around for many years and did full programmes with studio based content

Here are two clips from YouTube, some of these look to be fairly new uploads




These clips are quite amusing. It looks like Central and Yorkshire were trying to outdo each other at how cheesy the programme could be. The titles, the theme music, the graphics, the sets, and the particularly the presenting. I thought Jon Hammond was cheesy but the Central lot are something else.

I also find it funny how Central Weekend Jobfinder didn’t actually feature any vacancies “because it’s the weekend”, therefore I doubt anybody watched and it seems pointless why they did the programme at weekends.

Gets better, Scottish had Jobfinder but never told people when it was going to broadcast. So you have watch all night to find them

Wow, £3.72 an hour to be a "Service Team Member". Amazing to think minimum wage at that time May 2001 was only £3.70 an hour.

A family member once told me Jobfinder was a series about a guy who walked around looking in public toilets to see what ones hadn't been flushed.

I believed him.

That Yorkshire one is crying out to be recut with classic titles from The Bill

Interestingly, the music in that 2001 Yorkshire Jobfinder video is the same as in this ITV Nightscreen from 3 years earlier, clearly re-using the same tape:



The endcap shows Yorkshire were responsible for playing out that particular edition of Nightscreen as well (another one I have from a couple of weeks earlier has a Granada endcap, so responsibility must have shifted around the regions), so it must have been one of YTV's tapes.

Another thing I remember is at that time on Yorkshire, we only got Nightscreen at weekends, as Jobfinder was on instead Monday-Friday.

"Why didn't you come in to sign on?"

"I was up late watching Jobfinder!"

Yorkshire/Tyne Tees seemed to end up with a lot of stuff overnight introduced in the late 90s which then lingered with pretty much no changes through into the 2000s, long after most others had dropped them. Jobfinder was basically identical 4 years earlier in 1997. And they also had Eastern Cinema then, which similarly persisted almost completely unchanged well into the 2000s. I'm not sure exactly when all of these were first launched, but presumably it was somewhere in the 1995-1997 pre-NPU days when Yorkshire had that big graphics department hanging around for producing all their trailers.

Does anyone know if Jobfinder actually filled a PSB requirement, as it seems odd that they got away with it in graveyard slots if they couldn't push their other ones to there. Or was it just one of those things they did so they could say they were *exceeding* PSB requirements whenever a report came up?

I remember a piece in Smash Hits in the mid-nineties following Take That around on tour, and it ended with Gary Barlow telling the reporter that they'd got in so late the night before, "I ended up watching Jobfinder, but i couldn't find anything to match my skills".

Amazing to see jobs listed as "MAN OR WOMAN". Another age!

Yes, I was going to say; I'm not sure about Central (I'd imagine it was similar) but YTV definitely had the Jobfinder as part of PSB commitments, and included it as part of their (very high for the 1990s) hour count for regional programming during this time (these were mentioned in the statistics of the ITC yearly performance reviews). I believe the Asian film stuff was similar, but wasn't counted under regional programming for obvious reasons.

Tyne Tees simply got whatever YTV were putting out for a long time. Indeed for quite a while TT even got the YTV-branded CSAs on the Sunday nights. Eventually they substituted Tyne Tees Community Link announcements during this time, and then later put the normal Night Time stuff out on TT as with Granada/Border, but this took quite a while.

TT took YTV's Jobfinder from the start of Night Shift in 1992, but for quite a while the jobs were Yorkshire only. Some years later they changed this so roughly 1/3 of the jobs were NE ones, a reasonable compromise.

Indeed, despite TT broadcasting JobFinder for five hours a night in 1987/88, they quickly decided they couldn't be bothered putting the North East jobs on this segment during Granada's Night Time and just let the Granada ones run (even before they stopped running ads after 2am). They started off replacing the NW jobs with NE ones, then started opting out late/back in early and then stopped altogether (I don't think Granada provided a cue dot for regional opts).

It would be interesting to discover whether UTV/Border/Grampian/HTV/TSW ever bothered with their own JobFinder segment, or if they also just left Granada's sustaining feed running (ISTR that HTV used Granada's schedule even when rebranding it "Night Club").