Where only one big ITV region opts out

I don't think that it's justified to say that it was a very weird nature. There was more autonomy between regions but from 1970ish the situation gradually started to become more unified between the regional schedules.



I can vaguely remember this although at the time Granada owned other ITV franchises across the country.



Sports events are probably a specific subcategory of this topic due to local factors.



I am aware of this as ITV regions had 'autonomous' timeslots where they each played out programmes separately. What the question in the OP centres on are situations where one of the big 4 regions (London, Midlands, North West, Yorkshire) is showing a different programme from that in the other 3 big regions and most of the medium and small regions.

I may have said this before, but I still remember William G Stewart asking the following question on 15-1 in the early 90s:
“ITV weekday evenings at 6 o’clock, what programme?”
The contestant didn’t know, but Stewart gave the “correct” answer of “Home and Away”, which was only true in some of the country.

Yep, H&A was always on straight after CITV here.

One time, with the opposite happening in sport, was when one of the Sheffield teams won a cup at Wembley, I think the EFL cup, and this was when ITV showed it live. Due to the surprise result, ITV Sport made a package of 30 minute highlights for showing later than night. Yorkshire, surprisingly, opted out of that, and stuck to it's normal schedules.

Ah yes... the infamous night in 1991 when viewers in Sheffield had the post-match celebrations interrupted by the already schedule War of the Monster Trucks, which Wednesday named a fanzine after. Yorkshire, I believe, were one of the few (if not the only) to opt out of the coverage, despite one of the region's most prominent teams being involved.

Yes, and here's Elton announcing they'll be continuing "in London and one or two other regions", although as you say, I think pretty much everyone carried on apart from Yorkshire.



And here's that controversial schedule in "full".





Well, that is by the by, because only the Granada region itself opted out.

A weird one I remember was Sex Education programme "Living and Growing", was a network commission for Grampian. There was a preview of the episode Schools would see that week, late on a Sunday evening with studio discussion after. This was so parents could be ready for their kids questions.

I remember reading this preview was shown only by two ITV companies, Grampian itself and LWT. There can't have been many programmes with so limited and geographically diverse carriage on ITV. The show itself was on ITV Schools so was shown everywhere.

Very interesting. I make a guess that the programme was played out separately in the two regions rather than networked. In the OP there was STV and TSW showing Emmerdale at the same time.

Heh, as mentioned earlier, YTV were notorious for a Leeds United bias. Four years before that Leeds played Charlton in a play-off at St Andrews (the teams were tied 1-1 on aggregate after home and away legs so a third match was played at St Andrews - this was when the play-offs involved relegation as well as promotion). It was expected to be a Leeds win and went out as a strange Yorkshire/ Big Match hybrid! Charlton won after the match going to extra time... I remember this going out on LWT late on a Friday night. (I suspect this only went out on LWT and YTV....)

There were several series of Living and Growing (it was updated every few years), so I’m not sure which era you’re referring to. I do recall a half-hour programme shown late at night on Tyne Tees which previewed an episode along with studio discussion like you described. This was in 1988.

That said, similar previews were shown in earlier years so that could be the example you refer to. Quite possibly it was shown at different times around the network.

There would be no technical reason why a feed from Grampian to LWT couldn't be arranged. It may well have been easier to do that than duplicate the tape and courier it to the South Bank.

Probably the easiest would be to play it down the line and record at South bank..
But remember in those days PO/BT vision circuits were not that plentiful ...
And a copy and a van may have been the preferred method...