Old Announcers

UTV were still doing live voiceovers on local advert slides up until the late 1990s - and they were still using a slide scanner to transmit said adverts!

The slide scanner was certainly still in use as late as 1997, as evidenced on this junction (2:46 onwards); I'm not sure if the voiceover from the duty announcer was live or played off a cart by that stage, it's hard to tell in this instance. I can recall live voiceovers on such ads still appeared on UTV well into the mid 1990s.

Not all advert slides voiceovers were done live on Ulster Television, however; this junction (1:43 onwards) and this junction (2:52 onwards) from 1982 has a mix of examples with pre-recorded audio and live voiceover by the CA.

What happened to the old UTV announcers from the 80's - Johanne Woods, Keith Burnside, Barbara Palmer and Keith Hayes

Joanne Woods went on to become a transmission controller at Havelock House.

Keith Burnside now reads the news on BBC Radio Ulster.

Barbara Palmer, now Barbara Bradley, works at a Belfast hospital.

Not sure where Keith Hayes is these days.

Of other 1980s announcers, Bill Smyth sadly passed away recently, John O'Hara is still actively doing voiceovers, Frank Mitchell still does the UTV weather and Julian Simmons, Pamela Ballantine and Rose Neill are still doing continuity at Havelock House - Pam and Rose after very long breaks from Studio 3!

From the 1990s, Gillian Porter is still there, Aidan Browne does sporadic out-of-vision relief shifts at UTV, Robin Taylor now concentrates on his job as a teacher, Tracey Anne Griffiths is still at Channel 4, Tina Campbell mainly does the Seven Thirty Show and Audra Thomas has probably gone back to focusing on her main day job hairdressing.

Great info thanks - they were the main ones from my childhood, we got both Border, who's presentation was grim in those days, and UTV as well, which seemed much better

This is something I've always wanted to know -- I only ever saw one night of Border presentation, around 1985.

The three or four links I saw were very perfunctory -- Allan Cartner was on duty that night, and on each occasion all I saw was ITV trailer -> completely unbranded holding slide -> ad break -> another ITV trailer -> maybe a menu voiced by Cartner -> straight into next programme.

No IVC that I saw, no enthusiasm, fairly long fades to black after each presentation piece and not even any effort to quicken up transitions using cross-fades/screen wipes etc.

It was, as you say, pretty grim. (As an aside this is pretty much what Tyne Tees turned into whenever Cartner was in the seat in Newcastle as well).

Was this typical of Border's output at the time (the one or two scraps available on the net are similar) or was I just unlucky to see a particularly boring night?

Made me so happy to get back to the friendly but clunky and wobbly presentation back on the other side of the pennines

Mmm, that was pretty much it, they didn't have their own end of programme slides, so just used the programme slides supplied by the network, no astons on the clips. The only announcer that did IVC was Pat Doody, he usually did Tuesdays and was in vision at 6.35 and that was pretty much it.

Promo wise, until they got the ITV promos, it was a programme clip with a voice over at the top, that cut to a slide and voice over at the end.

To introduce programmes they used either the Border Television caption, the programme slide supplied by the network, or a slide with the day of the week written on it, or Now on Border Television.

They did more in vision in 1986/87 when Isabel Jarrett, Daphne Neville, John Myers and Lesley Cairney joined the announcing team, not at the same time. Alan, Clem and Clive hardly ever, if at all, did IVC, but presented the news bulletins in vision.

They were phased out in 1988, and a new team recruited, who were in vision in peak time.

Transmission beefed up in 1987 ish, and started using cross fades and wipes, with the occasional aston on promos, they also introduced more of their own branded slides.

Oh god, that sounds even more depressing than I thought Like Yorkshire but without the budget...

Tyne Tees did the old "clip with voiceover/slide" thing quite a lot as well (plenty of examples on the net), but a lot of them had fully-branded astons, and even the ones that didn't did at least have captions, and branding at the end, and typically were used in a little package containing menus, IVC, and were generally introduced by the duty announcer in-vision before they started. TBH if done properly this kind of promo feels a lot more "real", even if it is the cheap get-out way of doing things.

This sort of thing really didn't cost very much to implement (if anything -- once you have the IVC studio and the caption generator you're all set), and any deficiencies in budget can be made up for by a friendly attitude and a bit of effort.

Why was Border so dull? No excuse for it really.

So Daphne Neville only joined in 1986? Jeez, that makes it even worse -- I've seen an old news bulletin read by Daphne and thought it dated back to the late 70s....

One other thought is that it would seem that Border only started to take in-vision seriously at the point where the bigger stations were getting shot of it (1987-8 ) -- how out of touch can you be? Especially when there was so much cross-pollination over the years with Tyne Tees across the pennines -- Allan, Clem Shaw, Lesley Manners, Pat Doody and (I believe) the mighty Bill Steel and the equally splendid Colin Weston all crossed over at various points. Surely there must have been some influence somewhere?!?

Wasn't that when Granada took over supplying 'pres', or was that later in the 90s ?

That would have been 1993 at the earliest.

Would I be correct in thinking the bigger companies (ATV/Central, Thames, LWT, Yorkshire, Granada) solely used their own branded trailers on screen, while the smaller companies took the ITV branded trailers?

I never saw ITV branded trailers on Central, & on the odd occasion I went elsewhere(TSW land) I saw ITV branded trailers.

If I'm wrong, how did it work?

Yorkshire generally used ITV branded trails right up to 1994. On the other hand, Anglia were making their own up as early as 1988. I don't think it was a case of size, more the attitude of the individual company -- Granada also used ITV branded trails until around 1986, for example.

Tyne Tees could never make the bl**dy minds up -- local trails were usually well branded, any programmes made by TTTV would usually have a local version of the promo and of course there were the live-produced ones, but they used a lot of ITV ones at various times as well, although it must be said that they were very heavily biased towards advertising their regional programmes first and foremost, and didn't play out all that many trails in any case compared to other areas, preferring to let the announcer lead the way.

Then, every so often, they'd go through a phase of producing their own -- only for ITV ones to gradually make their way back in later when they got bored with it.

I think Tyne Tees were probably the last station to put out live-captioned trails (where the announcer would V/O live and any graphics were done by continuity's caption generator) -- there were *still* a few of these going out in 1991/92, particularly for daytime films and programmes where scheduling differed from region to region. Apart from TTTV, the last station I know of that was still doing this was HTV in 1986.

I think even LWT used a *lot* of ITV trails around 1989-1990.

Fairly run-of-the-mill example of the live-produced trail here:

http://www.tv-ark.org.uk/mivana/mediaplayer.php?id=6f4e59ec2bcdd4dc3fe8b96901c5fa89&media=tttv_continuity_1_1987&type=mp4

Very much TTTV, rather than ITV branded. And *very* old-fashioned, even in 1988. Imagine how it looked four years later