Memories of Regional Programmes

Depends on local practice, but when I worked at BBC Bristol, in order to get the Swindon Town goals, we’d have to record the lunchtime Central South, via a circuit from Radio Wiltshire (Swindon) and hope they’d show them. The circuit was (I think) relatively low quality (possibly an RS1000?). If there was time the footage was then also zoomed up slightly via the gallery DVE, to move the Central logo out of frame, also softening the image.

Certainly many regions did ad hoc football highlights shows on Saturday nights in this period - Granada would do The Granada Match maybe once a month. But Goals on Sunday was the only regular weekly highlights show which looks like the kind of thing we have now during this period, as live games were of greater importance. I remember reading it was all arranged outside of the main ITV deal with the Football League, YTV liaising with the clubs individually, and that it all worked on a different way to normal highlights as YTV covered them with a much smaller crew than usual, and I think paying much less than they would for a normal match covered for highlights on the network.

Interesting ! So there was no formal exchange procedure, such as booking a line to each other, or sending runners across town to swap tapes ?

Wow - removing the logo with a DVE zoom would probably now most definitely put you in breach of the sport news access agreement (and probably was in breach then too!).

I'm pretty certain it would have issues in 'fair dealing' terms - though nobody fair deals sport in the UK AIUI.

That said, I'm sure I've seen very recently, football clips on BBC South Today, that are completely (original) graphics free, though there is still a locally captioned credit to Sky or BT etc ? Presumably these are clean feed images sent via Salford ?

If they're Premier League or FA Cup clips, then the Beeb will presumably have a clean feed as they're rights holders so will be able to supply that. For the Football League, or other competitions they don't have the rights to, it would presumably be the modern day equivalent of taping them off the telly.

On Breakfast it seems to be down to if there's a Match of the Day scheduled or not. Sometimes you get "courtesy BBC Sport" with a clean feed, other times, like today "courtesy Amazon Prime"/ "courtesy Sky Sports" with their graphics. Also I've noticed that Scottish Premiership is BBC Sport but it is not a clean feed and includes the graphics and BBC Scotland DOG.

In addition they have this segment called Lockdown Life where they're interviewing sports figures and how their doing during lockdown, a few weeks back they interviewed a ten-pin bowler, showed some footage from CBS in the states, without a credit. Wonder if that was part of the BBC-CBS agreement.

Just to knock this thread slightly sideways, on related note to the above.

Whenever BBC News show the 20 seconds of that Sunday's F1 race in the late Sunday bulli, they always show footage from the Sky Sports coverage, rather than the Channel 4 highlights shown earlier.
Point being, having the Sky Sports F1 DOG in the corner of the screen, rather than Channel 4 which more often than not is 'undog-ed'

Is it a case, that any footage must come from the primary rights holder of that sport?

It’s been a while since I’ve been involved but there was (fairly recently) a goals exchange for sharing of English football league highlights. This made recording off air less routine and meant clean copies of the goals.

A crew would attend each match and record the whole game, single camera. They’d take notes of the times at which goals and anything interesting happened then drive the tapes to their assigned playout centre. If there was time before their playout slot, they’d edit a rough cut of the highlights otherwise just spin through the tapes until they’d send all the bits people might want. Bigger sites might be responsible for sending a whole load of games, smaller sites maybe just one or two. Most would simultaneously record the whole incoming goals exchange so there was a recording of everyone’s goals.

Yes well, a long time ago and before regions were receivable on Sky so no one probably knew! I just did what I was told, so HTV and Central logos were zoomed out...

I’m sure fairly recently Calendar used to crop the football highlights to less than full screen. This was when they went through a phase of showing the goals in 60 seconds with a music track over the top.

Whoever had the EFL highlights at that point would have their own graphics appearing on and off throughout the montage, so Calendar would crop it down, and add their own consistent ones which would be cleaner than graphics on top of graphics. There would still be a ‘Pictures from...’ credit

One Friday night offering on STV, usually after 11pm, was "The Funny Farm", a sort of comedy and music show, which opened with a chicken walking along the street, opening a door, and you then went in seeing a band playing. An unusual show, in that it had no opening theme tune, just opening titles.