Networked ITV - 1990s and before...

If you look at the programme line-ups on those clips you'll notice that there's no live programmes or those from other regions - it's all imports or Thames productions.

I'd have thought that either they were trying to keep it as simple as possible or there were union problems at other regions/BT preventing the networking of programmes to them. Judging by the rest of the presentation the former seems likely, chances are that no-one had experience in that field. Note that the 'Thames News' bulletins are actually national/international news.

I remember that strike, the Daily Mirror (which my family got at the time) were still printing schedules but with a disclaimer at the top saying that programmes were subject to change. I seem to recall that TVam would finish and then a blue and white caption would appear for the rest of the day. I don't think there were even schools programmes (although the end of October would have been half term)

You're probably right, I tend to get the two mixed up.

Yes, the only programmes Thames showed were their own productions, mainly from their back catalogue, and imports they had sitting on their shelves. They did show some of their own productions as billed, including three episodes of The Bill, but these weren't networked and the rest of the country showed them at the end of the season, out of sequence. Interestingly though, Anglia and Tyne Tees were able to take the Thames feed of Sons and Daughters during the dispute period, and the relevant companies were able to screen The Sullivans via the Thames feed - I'm not sure why this was allowed/possible when the prime-time Thames productions couldn't be networked.

You're correct - Thames showed no school programmes locally or nationally during this period and the remainder of the network saw apology captions and music during the gaps where a Thames schools programme would have appeared. All the missing episodes were networked over a couple of mornings at the end of the term, and Thames viewers saw an additional morning or two of the schools programmes from other regions they missed during the dispute.

I remember Thames scheduled Coronation Street four nights a week for a while to catch up with the rest of the country, and showed subtitles on Oracle P370 (the 300s being local pages), as subtitles for the 'wrong' episodes were going out on P170, the national subtitling page at that time.

A very HYPOTHETICAL question, re ITV today.

The British film industry is celebrating 100 glorious years of making films in blighty. To celebrate ITV have decided that on a Sunday afternoon each of the original 14 regions can show a brit film that was either filmed or made about their region.
With the way ITV is set up today, could ITV in London play out 14 different films to the regions at the same time? As all the films have different times the adverts start and finish, could London and Leeds play out all these adverts at different times for each region?
If it is not technically possible, could ITV send each region a copy of their film and each region play it out themselves, including playing out their own adverts? Does each region still have the manpower and equipment to do this?
And what about the BBC, forgetting the adverts could either BBC 1 or BBC 2 do this?

IIRC isn't transmission still split between London and Leeds?

For ITV it wouldn't be unlike the regional political opt outs. London would play out everything south of Central, Leeds would play out Central and northwards up to Border. STV and UTV would do their own, of course.

The BBC would do it by having each region play out their own film, opting out much like they do for regional news. There's no reason why ITV couldn't do this, but having the centralised pres and playout facilities do it would be much cheaper in terms of not having to staff galleries up and down the country.

With a couple of exceptions, the ITV 'regions' are not self-contained TV stations, they are just news production centres. Theoretically there's no reason why they couldn't just load a film and pre-built advert breaks into their systems and play them out to air but it's not exactly ideal. It could be done via the regular playout facilities which were built to do that


Of course, the 3 'nations' do it every day and the English regions play out their own programmes most weeks, it would be no different to Inside Out.

How did you know the Sons and Daughters and Sullivans feeds were originating from Thames though ?

There was one exception in the middle of the strike. The unions allowed an edition of 'This Week' to be produced, and networked, I can't remember the subject matter, but it was deemed relevant enough to break the strike for.

To be honest, I don't. S&D was missing from the Tyne Tees schedules while Thames was backed out, and reappeared when it started its emergency schedule, so the dates coincided.

It's possible that either Anglia or Tyne Tees had copies of the tapes, and were playing them out on the same dates as Thames in order to keep everything in sync.

Presumably arranging for a dirty feed of Thames output would be fairly trivial to arrange, if the BT engineers and those at Tyne Tees were prepared to play ball?

I do recall one Friday evening LWT's management putting out a schedule, owing to a local strike there. The only ITV company to take the programmes was Tyne Tees I think. This was 78/79ish I think. The Daily Telegraph's Sean-Day-Lewis always gave a good detailed account of events in those days !