Networked ITV - 1990s and before...

I can't remember. Border once ran the same episode of Mr and Mrs two weeks in a row. It was a local show at that time, and aired at 8.30 p.m. on Fridays. They abandoned the programme at half time and screened one of the "Sound of..." series instead. ("Sound of...was a 15 minute local programme featuring musical acts like Dorita y Pepe, the Settlers (who performed the theme from Follyfoot), Julie Felix and the like. That was in the days when even peak viewing hours on the ITV network saw a huge amount of local variations.

There's a story about the same episode of 'Crossroads' being screened 2 nights running, isn't there?

I think that happened on TSW sometime in the mid-80s.

Apparently one day in the seventies ATV sent out the following day's episode by accident, and I think one viewer complained that it didn't make sense.

The GMTV problem would probably have been a PO line switch error. The Scotsport error would have been finger trouble at Black Hill.

[quote="Markymark" pid="745901"]

AIUI ITN was routed to network via Thames or LWT (and I gather that at one time it used to just appear rather than from a VT clock). (see the TTTV Routine Sheet that Si-Co posted earlier in this thread) I would imagine that the Central trail would also have been routed via Thames/LWT otherwise every station would have had to do another genlock operation in a pretty short amount of time, and so the switch from CEN to ITN would have been done by Thames.

As to why Central sent their local output, could it have been that a voiceover was being added to the trailer live by Mike Prince?

On the subject of 'What went wrong?' I remember a Sunday morning in 1982 when Tyne Tees were showing the programme Chalkface at, I think, 9.30am - I'm not sure if this was being played out from their own VT or up the line from somewhere.

At the start of the programme the Granada frontcap came on screen, but instead of hearing the Chalkface theme tune, viewers heard the closing bars of the theme from the programme Link. After a few seconds, the Chalkface audio/theme tune was faded up.

I know some regions were showing Link at 9.30 - is it possible TTT were recording Link up the line, or previewing their recording, and put the wrong audio source to air?

Also, does anyone else recall that during ITV schools programmes, you could often hear the interval tape playing faintly over the programme itself, before it was faded up at the end of the programme? This went on for years, and only stopped at the start of 1985 when I think Central had their presentation suite upgraded. A dodgy fader to blame, I assume?

The odd Chalkface problem - here's what might have happened.

It wasn't uncommon for programmes to be made sans company logos, and often these were added on transmission. However, in order to do that the local CTA would either have to originate a dirty feed and then clean it up once the programme had started; or feed the slide scanner to network and then do a cut at the start of the programme. My guess is that's what happened, and CCA fed the audio from the preceding programme to accompany the slide - either in error, or because that's how the switcher was configured!

There was an occasion in the early days of BBC 2 having Scottish local programming when a half-hour Scottish programme ran with sound from the network show rather than the local one throughout the entire 30 minutes. Whether no-one noticed or nobody cared or they couldn't rectify the fault, I don't know.
Back to ITV....in the early 80s when Border came back on air after a local strike which blacked out programmes for a good number of days....Crossroads was preceded by a specially recorded "foreword" by Meg Mortimer (Noele Gordon), outlining to "our friends in the Border TV region" a precis of what had happened in the episodes they'd missed. And, no, Miss Tatum hadn't turned into a frenzied axe murderer in the local post office!

Here's one. If there was a newsflash that had to be read out over an ITN Slide, and it was networked, was it the responsibility of each region to read the same script to their area, or did Thames/LWT read it out to everyone? A video exists on TV-Ark of Phillip Elsmore reading out a newsflash over an ITN Newsflash slide in 1981. Would this have been networked, or did each region get the same script, and do it locally?

This is going off the point a bit but I remember Points of View at some point in the late eighties, early nineties, where you could hear the soundtrack of Food and Drink, which was on BBC2 at the time, in the background, and the following week they read out a letter about it, and the fact you could also hear the soundtrack from Points of View during Food and Drink, and apologised that someone had put some plugs in the wrong way round.

Wouldn't such a practice have been a good way to annoy the rest of the network, because the VT clock they were seeing would be wrong?