Networked ITV - 1990s and before...

It depends what you mean by 'quality' - sure programmes like Blind Date or Game For a Laugh were low brow or intelligent formats but they certainly weren't poor quality programmes. Big L.E. shiny floor shows aren't all 'low quality' Gladiators is a good example

Just looking through TV Ark's list, what about: The Professionals, The Gentle Touch, Poirot, Upstairs Downstairs, London's Burning, Aspel & Company, Dame Edna, It'll Be Alright on The Night (compare this with modern day equivalents!), An Audience With.... Then there's the good but not as popular shows like South Bank Show, Weekend World/Walden/Dimbleby etc.


I meant the only one anyone remembers - the Border TV one (and not the LWT or the HTV one)

Actually "Mr & Mrs" (or the Welsh version "Sion a Sian") was first made by TWW. Anglia and Ulster also did local versions before Border and HTV started taking turns to network it.

What makes you say that - there's very little difference between playing it to their own region and also playing it to HTV is there? Maybe just a means of switching between the TK directly and the local pres desk so they add "after the news" announcements, but that's fairly trivial, surely?

Indeed it was, Tony - I'd forgotten all about that. Thanks.

Erm.... LWT did two versions of Mr & Mrs if you count the spoof featured on End of Part One in 1979 - 'Mr & Mr & Mrs', complete with Border's logo altered to read 'Boredom Television'.

Point being that if the idea was so "crap" why did the quality LWT seek to copy it?

Anyway the point of my post wasn't so much that LWT have *never* produced good programming; of course they have, as have Carlton for that matter. The comment was in response to the typical bone-headed arrogance that came out of Michael Grade's mouth. "We're a big company and can apply more polish to our productions, so of course what that little company 150 miles down the road is proposing is automatically a load of old rubbish".

Grade has a track-record of coming out with such tosh, and for him to have said it as chairman of LWT, a company associated largely (though not completely) with unchallenging material, was ridiculous.

Simply because sending your continuity (for that is what it amounts to), appropriately switched so that the recipient station doesn't receive a dirty feed, to a third party is something that takes preparation and extra equipment, and I would have thought that a station like Grampian, who would not usually be in the business of sending films to another station, probably would not have their system set up in such a way that this would be trivial.

Pre-packaging material and hitting play on a VTR, sure. Sending out a live relay of a telecine, making sure that a clean feed at the start and end is sent, but that this is cross-faded at the appropriate time with a holding slide for commercial breaks, having the option of sending clean or with live continuity attached etc etc is something that you have to be set up to do.

Tyne Tees TV did not have such a facility in place to the best of my knowledge, so they would not have been capable of doing this live (indeed all end-of-programme promos to network were pre-recorded as part of the broadcast tape of any networked show, unlike say YTV who would do this live) -- so why would Grampian, a smaller station with fewer opportunities to send material to other stations?

As I said, HTV, being a somewhat larger operation than TTTV, may well have had the setup to manage it. The "Big 5" certainly did. But I would have thought that any station smaller than TTTV would have had a configuration at most as sophisticated as that at Newcastle.

You could well be right, jj. My point above was that if two regions were playing out a film at the same time, it seems unlikely to be a coincidence and they may well have agreed for one station to take a feed from the other. If only a clean feed from telecine was available to the second station, there was nothing to stop them inserting EOP/holding slides locally at the break points. In reality, I'm not sure how regular the example given of say HTV and GPN scheduling the same film simultaneously would have been though.

Because it's a good format and they thought they could do better.

You can have a great format but it's the execution that matters. Border chose cheap and twee, LWT tried flashy and 'celebrity'. A programme in the style of the Border version wouldn't survive more than 1 episode in the 21st century.... the LWT one was crap in other ways

This is in part a question I've asked a few times and never really got an answer to. How did the arrangement regarding purchased programmes (or films) scheduled locally work in terms of money? I am under the impression that one station (eg. Thames or YTV) made the original purchase and became 'responsible' for the programme and sometimes edited it for UK tx (adding EOP slides, countdown clocks etc) and then 'sent' these to other regions (down the line, on the back of a van or otherwise) when requested. I believe a 'dubbing fee', 'transport fee' etc would be payable in this case to Thames or YTV but what about the fee payable to the distributors?

For example, Central buy Sons and Daughters from Grundys/ITFC/whoever for £1400 per episode (just a random convenient figure). They then say to network 'We've bought this, it's going out three times a week at 3.30 - who wants to take our feed'? The other 13 regions all say yes, Central charges them £100 each so the cost is shared equally. Grundy's get the set fee, and Central save a lot of dosh. But alternatively, what if no-one else wants the show at that point in time? Would Central be charged the same fee from the distributors, or would the fee depend on the target market, and be cheaper if the show wasn't networked?

Six months later, Thames decide to show S&D. Central has already edited the tapes (stuck EOP captions on, cut out an afternoon-unfriendly sex scene, cut out 'fly Ansett' from the end credits, etc) so not a lot of point in Thames not using those copies. Would Thames just buy copies of the tapes from Central, at a fee set by Central, or would they have to pay something to Grundys as well - assuming the price of the programme had gone up because it was now been shown to a larger audience?

I do remember a famous, Dallas



The tape thing never went to all compaines.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MigcKcdpkgg Country Patrice

All the companies started off showing it "Hourly" but then same switched to "30min" format, until 14 out of the 15 did this but STV Stuck to there gun's and keep the hourly format, so there must have been two sets of tapes around

Entirely true -- but then the programme wasn't a product of the 21st century was it?

Yes it was cheap and twee -- perfect for the kind of audience this format would attract. Border had it spot-on for the time and the audience, the programme lasted for donkeys' years and I believe that LWT would have made a mess of it in 1970 if they had tried the glitzy approach even then.

I dare say that many of the programmes you highlighted as LWT classics wouldn't last five minutes in their existing format today. Times change.