Shoestring: Complete Series One and Two DVD release

Only 8 years before my time! We're more of a Murder She Wrote household.

It's also worth watching for the completely unrealistic idea the writer had, of just how big a city based ILR station was in the early/mid 80's.

Shoestring's Radio West had its own canteen (most 'proper' stations were lucky if they had a half stocked chocolate/crisp vending machine), and even it's own in-house photography department.

What do you consider to be a 'proper' station? Most decent sized local stations that I can think of had canteens right through to the 90s and even 00s. I actually started work at one local group in 2005 and that had a fully staffed canteen (although admittedly that was ripped out and replaced with vending machines within a year.

There was an ILR station at the time called Radio West. How did that work, did they copy the name from the series in the hope of getting publicity from it?

Yep, pretty much.

The real Radio West - Which through various licence changes, cash flow issues and takeovers, eventually became GWR - who then merged much later with Capital Radio Group, and then was brought by Global Rasio - which pretty much runs local and bits of national commercial radio in England..

Eddie if he played his cards right, could have ended up doing weekend overnights on Classic FM by now!

Heritage ILR's. The one's that are now mostly called 'Heart'
There may have been canteens/restaraunts based within building where stations were tennants - but where they owned their own buildings - self service canteens were few and far between.
The one's I've been to (see below), I've never spotted the faint wiff of lunch being served next to the racks room..

Beacon Radio, BRMB (I even held the door open for the daily sandwich delivery, once), Leicester Sound, Severn Sound, Trent, Radio Wyvern, Radio City (Stanley Street era), Red Dragon (before the move to the docks)

I remember it, due to it getting repeats on daytime BBC1 around 2001/2002!

Yes, Series One and the early episodes of Series Two were given a weekday afternoon rerun on BBC1 in 2002. I still have all episodes shown during this rerun on S-VHS. However, they were invariably considerably edited down from their original lengths due to the 45 minute time slot they were given. The stories suffered as a result. Also, the silly inclusion of the BBC blocks logo was placed onto the opening shot after the opening titles. The episode lengths of Shoestring varied widely, anything from around 48 minutes to around 55 minutes, unheard of nowadays.

A handful of stars (some already known, some as yet unknown) played parts in the series, including a young Daniel Day Lewis.

They did the same for Bergerac about 12-15 years ago, and 2entertain ended up using the daytime edits for the series 1 and series 2 DVDs. They used the uncut versions for the complete box set, though. The original film transfers weren't great, though, with some episodes being semi-interlaced, frame-blended, or field-misaligned. Perfectly watchable, but with room to be improved by someone with far too much time on his hands.