Networked ITV - 1990s and before...

Steve, I've seen this happen, I think it was in 1987.

YTV were showing Home To Roost to the network, TTTV lost the pictures but YTV continued. The image changed to a Granada testcard, which was quickly faded out and replaced with a crash/holding slide.

TT lost about 2 minutes of the programme and joined it with the missing part not shown.

This may have been a problem with TTTV rather than network, but I don't think so.

I read this as being the regional text inserts rather than actual regional news broadcasts.

These presentation slides were definitely locally inserted at the close of movies and imports. Tyne Tees never bothered with them until the takeover in 1993; they would simply fade to black at the end, and if for whatever reason they needed to cut out the credits completely they had a special slide with "THE END" written in large serif text.

Just hacking back to "ITV" Promos: Im not sure how much of these were used.

http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/itv1/1970s.html
http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/itv1/1980s.html


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyCZDJtdcmA

The ITV promotions for new seasons and Christmas etc were regular fixtures. As I understand it the big companies took it in turns to produce the branding packages for the new season promos. So Central would do, say, Easter, Granada the Autumn season and LWT Christmas etc


This was part of the campaign by ITV prior to the 1990 Broadcasting Act to try and lobby against any major changes to the ITV network (hence the song). They ran full page press ads too

I'm not sure what these promos have to do with networking, the all would have been played out locally by each company

I concur. A 'presentation' slide (as opposed to a 'production' endcap) had no bearing at all on which station had edited a purchased programme. As JJ says, it was just part of local pres and generated locally by the TC. Similarly, some stations (notably Thames and Yorkshire) played their animated/musical frontcap (with no mention of the word 'production') before these programmes and films, even if they were being fed in from another region. Just a way of promoting or identing the station I guess. I remember when TTT started using their 'presentation' endcap', as part of the 1992 rebrand. I actually really liked that rebrand, but it was unfortunately marred by many mishaps during 1993 when TTT appeared to receiving a 'dirty feed' from YTV a lot of the time, and many snippets of YTV pres we weren't supposed to see up here kept coming through!



Odd how the Granada bars came up, if this was being fed from YTV directly to the other regions - unless TTT inadvertently cut to a Granada feed - maybe the following programme was coming from Granada and the line was already open ready for that programme? Perhaps this would indicate the problem was at Tyne Tees end, and not with the network?

The use of "presentation" endcaps was more of a branding exercise than anything else, reinforcing the idea that your local ITV contractor "brought" the great movies and US film series to you. This in fact means some viewers actually believed that the programmes were made at the local studios. Tales abound of punters turning up at STV's studios in Hope Street asking for Lorne Greene's autograph....

They had a serious presentation use as well, though - if the timing went awry you could always hack out to the pres slide and thence into the break. In fact at STV we hald copies of the production endcaps of all the other companies, so that in the event of a timing disaster you could hack away to - say - a Granada Production endcap. This had the useful side effect of making it look like the mess was somebody else's fault!!

If a programme was being networked it was the responsibility of the local contractors to deal with any breakdown - a networked programme would run from start to finish even if nobody was able to see it!
Well, usually.

There was the occasion when a lunchtime music programme from Ulster turned out not to have a Part Two. This had been sent for editing to an outside facility that ACTT had declared 'black'. It was only during the commercial break that Ulster clamly informed the network (via the red phone) that there wasn't a second part!

STV used to network quite a few programmes. If there was a 'pub anno' at the end (no - nothing to do with beer, these were announcements promoting an associated publication, usually a record of the theme tune or a book tie-in) the local announcer would do it over a slide. To make that work, CCR would make the network feed 'dirty' at the end allowing the network to take the output from MCR. That was why on ITV you would sometimes hear announcers from othe regions.

The sudden appearance of a Granada 'test card' (I assume this was nothing of the sort but was bars) suggests a line switch. Now and again you'd lose a programme suddenly if a line switch happened at the wrong time. Indeed I made a joke about that on one of the Christmas Funnies tapes.....

Yes, it was colour bars, I just couldn't think of the right phrase to use at the time.........

TTTV didn't go dirty when publicising books etc at the end of their programmes; they'd pre-record a piece to put at the end of the programme and splice it in at the end of the tape being played out to the network. I'm assuming this was for technical reasons, coupled with TTTV's presumed desire not to want to play out a particularly loud fader clunk at the start/end, as would be typical on local output!

Oh, and TTTV were receiving a very dirty feed in 1993. All trails and adverts were played out from Leeds, and TTTV were expected to take this raw feed and insert their own continuity bits. Unfortunately, for a while YTV weren't bothering to do it properly and would simply cut off the trailer and swap to the YTV feed the second they went to their continuity insert, leaving TTTV with egg on their faces. TTTV had no control over this as all feeds to network had been severed at the start of 1993 and TTTV's transmission centre had only one feed, from Leeds. Similarly there was only one line from Newcastle back to Leeds.

Eventually YTV started to do things a bit more professionally, leaving the trailer running until a few seconds before the next programme at which point they'd switch to a clean feed of the programme, switching once again to the dirty YTV feed a few seconds into the programme. Unfortunately they didn't even get this particularly right and you'd sometimes see the start of a programme followed by a flash of the YTV logo and then back into the programme again.

Unfortunately no-one at the company it seems had the mental fortitude to do things the way ITV does now, and cut to black for a couple of seconds to give the satellite station(s) a chance to opt-in cleanly. I remember speaking to a TTTV TC at the time who used some colourful language to describe the situation, as he was getting it in the neck from management for "missing" an opt that wasn't clearly communicated or handled by YTV in the first place. But of course Leeds could do no wrong and that was that. Then the ITC started forcing TTTV to apologise on-air for the mess and something was done about it.

I don't know how clean a typical junction on Channel TV was, considering they were always opting in and out of a dirty feed from Westward, (later TSW, later TVS, later Meridian) ?

I've heard there were similar issues at Channel with bits of Meridian continuity popping up by mistake at times - but I don't think the problems were as common as those at Tyne Tees in 1993. Thanks for the additional info, jjne.

I remember those 'pub annos', and also the networked announcements if a film was being shown in two parts either side of News at Ten. I also remember Bill Steel at TTT advertising a publication over the closing credits of a networked show, only for his 'patter' to crash into a networked anno TTT obviously weren't expecting! Bill also had the habit of name-checking and thanking the announcers of promos and annos that came in from other regions "That was my old friend Andrew Elsmore telling us about This is Your Life there, thanks Andrew", which was a nice touch but I expect most viewers must have thought Andrew was sitting in a cupboard somewhere in the Tyne Tees studios!

Was there any type of 'transmission hold' after networked announcements, like the pub annos? Normally the screen would flicker at the end of the announcement before local stations cut to their own pres - was this someone at the originating station hitting 'pause' or something to avoid their pres going out to network, or a 'cue' for the regions to 'get out now'? Occasionally TTT didn't cut away in time and a YTV or Granada 'coming next' slide would pop up briefly, but this was rare.

Perhaps Andrew Elsmore was sat in a cupboard at TTT, while his better known brother Phillip was sat in Euston.