Has the "Multichannel Era" killed off quality Television?

On the whole, the range of quality is better. It's easy to forget just how restricted choice was in the era of four TV channels. TV producers and schedulers also have to work a lot harder today. No longer can a scheduler put literally anything on and guarantee it would get an audience.

However, there has been the growth of the nakedly cynical manipulative element, primarily through reality TV. It's noteworthy when you watch "Worst TV moments" type shows, a lot of the clips from the 1980s and 1990s are from shows that were genuinely made with good intentions that turned out to be flops due to flawed concepts or poor production values. Whereas clips from 2000 and beyond are primarily items orchestrated by reality TV producers.

So in England where you had Anglia and Yorkshire etc etc - could you just adjust your aerial to the transmitter you wanted? Was there ever a case where you could see two regions on your TV?

I always wondered about that.

my granddad had a double aerial that could receive Wales and the West, but had a little switch behind the TV which would change between the two. The reason was this was to be able to receive Channel 4 as well as BBC/HTV Wales.

Here you could always receive a decent, but not perfect, signal for S4C which was usually tuned to channel 6. Nowadays I can receive a perfect signal of S4C and the rest of the Welsh channels on Freeview. In fact the signal sometimes overpowers the north west channels (puts the Welsh channels at the top instead of in the 800s).

There were places in England were you could actually get three ITV stations.

Yep, we had three aerials at home (Hants/Berks border) that gave us Southern ( our official ITV) London, and ATV Midlands. I was watching Tiswas long before any of my school friends

We also had three ITV regions at home in Wrexham, HTV was our "official" region but most people watched Granada and a sizeable number opted for Central. I could pick up all three and on League Cup nights I occasionally flicked between three highlights shows. Peterborough is also on the cusp of three but I think the record holder might be Buckingham, where someone I know grew up and where they could pick up four - Central, TVS, London and Anglia.

Liverpool was (and is) split, transmitter-wise. Most of the north and east of the city have their aerial's points northwards to Winter Hill, whilst much of the south points southwards to Storeton on the Wirral. Those on Storeton could usually get a fairly strong HTV Wales picture from Moel-y-Parc on analogue, though it could be prone to ghosting if conditions weren't so good. Those pointing towards Winter Hill were usually Granada-exclusive. That was the situation in my house.

One evening, as a teenager, I pressed some button on our TV which undid the preset and I had to tune BBC One back in. I found it but it was a bit snowy, although the sound was pretty much fine. It even stumped my dad when he came in. All became clear a while later when Look North came on. So I knew instantly what had happened and found the Winter Hill signal. That then intrigued me and I went about looking to see what I could find. Got a near perfect Yorkshire signal. It was still there the next morning but the signal degraded as the day went on and by late afternoon, you could only just make out a picture amongst the noise. I often checked from then on to see how good the signal was on certain days but it never got near that quality again.

I also found another Granada (presumably from Storeton) and HTV Wales but these were nowhere near watchable either. I found Central at my grandmother's place (aerial pointing at Storeton), although that was nowhere near watchable either. I believe parts of the Wirral and the Chester area could get a decent picture of Central and in some cases, had to rely on it.

Of course your aerial would have been pointing in the wrong direction, and quite possibly the wrong group. Others in the area might have had aerials aligned on those other transmitters and got usable results.

The Storeton relay was (and still is) vertically polarised, (so the receiving aerial needs to have its rods vertically aligned) main transmitters employ horizontal polarisation. The reason is to reduce interference from
distant transmitters. For instance Storeton shared its channels with Belmont in Lincs, and Ridge Hill in Herefordshire. Although these stations are a long way away from Liverpool, it actually didn't take a great deal of signal to cause noticeable interference on your 'wanted' transmitter's reception, this would usually manifest itself as 'Venetian blind' style lines on the picture. By using different polarisation, this significantly reduces the amount of signal an aerial receives on the opposing polarity. In broadly the same direction from Liverpool as Storeton, are Moel-y-Parc (HTV/BBC Wales) and The Wrekin (Central/BBC Midlands). However both were (and still are) Horz P.

There's the other matter that Steve mentioned of aerial groups. There were three main bands that transmitters used, UHF Group A, B, and C/D. Storeton was Group A, as was The Wrekin, but Moel-y-Parc was Group B, and Winter Hill C/D. Aerials only really properly respond to transmissions within the group they are designed for. When DTT started many muxes ended up 'out of group' from the legacy analogue channels, which just exacerbated the reception problems in the early days. Still carries on today, for instance the two recent COM 7 and 8 muxes (that carry BBC 4 HD, QVC HD etc) are in Group A at all transmitters. So anybody with a C/D aerial for Winter Hill (+90%) will receive these at a significantly reduced level. That's why Wideband aerials now exist, to enable all mux reception in such areas

Finally, the case of distant TV channels being present one day but not the other, is a case of tropospheric ducting, brought on by settled weather conditions.

Further reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_propagation

The most extreme example of that is when the BBC Television Service appeared somewhere in the US during the 50s because of freak weather conditions - and they actually recorded it (it's online somewhere).

Was it this one?

https://archive.org/details/BbcTelevisionReceivedInNewYork-1938