Networked ITV - 1990s and before...

I never know about that, Im surprised STV never joined in as there also broadcast programes like that, Along with Deep-quest, Thunder in paradise

This is my favourite TV Forum thread.

Even shared continuity, remember it well all of the announcers never mentioned on the end credits the station name, apart from one who always said '.... and you can see the next episode here on Grampian and Border next week at whatever time it was.

You could always tell when it was Border networking,, they showed Warner Brothers Cartoons as fillers instead of Grampians eternal favourite - Roger Ramjet.

I was thinking back to earlier times when I made that post -- and the Grampian/Border arrangement seems rather more than simply sending each other programmes -- indeed the very fact that they were sharing continuity hints at exactly the issues I was mentioning.

How exactly did that work then? Did one station effectively take over transmission of the other for a spell? I'm assuming that some sort of arrangement similar to early YTV-Tyne Tees was taking place, where local trailers were loaded into the "spare" (ex-Channel 4) cart machine at the transmission centre.

If so, this is an entirely different arrangement to packaging for network.

No, think it was a case of both channels realised they were packaging pretty much the same episodes of the same programme, and decided to pool resources. The presentation kit was common to both, they both ran their own local ads and promos.

Hello, long time lurker and first time poster! Don't know if this is of any help, but there's some old videos on Channel's Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/channeltelevision. There's a few idents and endboards that I'd not seen before.

Welcome to TVF, Dave, and what a find. Especially the titles to the Channel Islands final of the 1980 UK Disco Dancing Championship, with the first time I've seen a colour version of the "hexagons" at the start:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150145477026457

Looks like that ident is a flash recreation pasted on the front of that clip... Still, a fantastic resource as mentioned and I'll be looking over it later.

A question that has been bugging me for a while and I thought I'd ask it here: What exactly happened to the "northern" ITV stations in the 1970s re in-vision continuity disappearing in just about all of them?

From what I can make out, IVC was commonplace in the 1960s in this area as everywhere else. The only station that refused to use it outright was Granada, and even then ABC made much use of it, as did Border and TTTV at the time.

Fast-forward to the early 1970s though, and (I am too young to remember but) it would seem as if it went grim oop North across the whole area. If I have things right, YTV switched off IVC when they moved presentation from ABC's old building in Didsbury to their new site in Leeds, and It never returned, so that's the easy one. And it seems that Border couldn't afford to upgrade to colour in one go, so went out of vision for a while starting around 1971 and it never really truly returned until the late 1980s.

Tyne Tees, Granada (and HTV!) I'm not sure about though. From what I can make out, TTTV went out of vision completely in around 1970 (presumably because they were flat broke and colour was costing too much to implement). But according to Greg Bance, in 1971 a "glory spot" was introduced early-evenings. I've heard conflicting information regarding when full IVC returned -- some say as early as 1972, some as late as 1976, but there are sound recordings on Andrew Bowden's site that suggest it was very much back at least in 1974. Anyone got the dates? And what did TTTV look like at the time, was it a very bland YTV-style or something else?

Colin Weston suggests that IVC came in at Granada around the time that Don Murray Henderson was killed in an accident -- but this was 1972 and I was under the impression that Granada stuck to its old formula right up until around 1978-79. And I've also read forum posts over the years that suggest that HTV went OOV for a spell in the 70s?

From what I can make out it's entirely possible that the whole of the North of England, southern Scotland, Isle of Man, Wales and the West were subjected to a starvation diet of slides and voiceovers for some part of the early 1970s......

So was IVC on its way out during this era and enjoyed some sort of bounce-back, or was it purely a cost-driven thing? And why was it mainly the Northern stations that seemingly couldn't be bothered?

Granada had IVC up until the early 1990's.
It always frustrated me that Granada was the least adventurous with it's presentation, and just when it started to experiment with the 'G' the Itv heart brand was introduced.

Yup, I know that Granada still used IVC on startup in the mornings around June/July 1996, which surprised me at the time as the previous year there had been no evidence of it when I was over there. Never could see the point in kitting out a studio then not using it. Do you have any idea when it started though over in Manchester?

I met Colin Weston many many years ago and he told me that by the end they were being restricted by Granada to doing just the 7pm intro (introducing the evening ahead) and one at the end of the night in-vision, with the rest OOV, so eventually they all decided it wasn't worth the effort and gave up on it entirely.

Scottish and Grampian did use them during the 70's and 80s. With Grampian it was more often IVC and there are clips on the net to prove this even from 1977. Scottish was more hit and a miss when it was used but mornings peak, closing. but by 1988 it was dropped expect for overnight.