Should (and could) ITV regionalise again?

Its exactly the same with Emley Moor but i can't see any city looking to each other.

In many ways, although the northern sub-regions come to more logical boundaries than southern equivalents the worst cases of granularity defying localness are northern.

Sheffield and Liverpool don't have a presence in their own catchment areas.

YTV did have news splits (and ads?) at one time for Crosspool, but much of the city actually comes off Emley Moor. Putting Crosspool and Chesterfield in with Belmont (serves Worksop) together makes sense, except even Sheffield is likely to feel more affinity with Leeds than Hull.

Liverpool at one time hosted Granada News for the whole North-west region, including Manchester. But our 3rd and 4th (is it 3rd and 5th?) city-regions remain bunged together in one TV region. You'd think that if we did have more granular TV off-air distribution, then Liverpool and Manchester would generate enough content for news and even differential sub-regional spot sales.

And here is the video for the new Calendar South service:

https://tvark.org/?page=media&mediaid=93204

There are a lot of towns in the Calendar south service that overlap with Anglia, like Spalding. I wonder whether they took that into consideration when making editorial decisions?

Good question. Without being disrespectful to any Lincolnshire natives I've always equated the county as being eastern or East Anglia not Northern

So did the broadcasting authorities originally, considering Belmont was Anglia and not Yorkshire until 1974.

South Lincs is pretty much a triple overlap between Waltham, Belmont and Sandy. Belmont seems prime though, anywhere north o and east of Peterborough. Deeping St Nicholas looks to be pretty Belmontish, but Market Deeping is a mixture. The Lincolnshire and Norfolk Fens are all Belmont, with the Isle of Ely being mainly Sandy Heath. King's Lynn would be all off Belmont if it didn't have its own low-power Tacolneston relay.

The issue with Belmont is the way in which the economic/social geography of the country can vary rapidly, in more spacious countries this isn't a problem. The distance between places like Hunstanton and Boston is exaggerated by having to go round the Wash. The actual linear distance isn't that great. I've been told, but never experienced it myself, that there are places on the North Norfolk coast where on a clear night, you can see the lights on the Belmont mast.

Transmitters have never been respectful of borders. That is certainly been true of Emley Moor.

Yes, I get Emley Moor here in Nottinghamshire, despite officially being in the Central/BBC East Midlands region. Some other people here get Belmont instead, but nobody can get a sniff of Waltham here even though technically it's the transmitter we're meant to be getting. Could also get Tyne Tees from Bilsdale here too, albeit fuzzily. Was always frustrating in the days before cable and satellite when there was a news story filmed locally and we were never able to see it, as it was on Central or East Midlands Today, and we were getting our local news from Leeds. I remember in 1999 when a news story was filmed at our school, and we were practically the only ones who had cable and therefore were able to actually see it. You'd think the people at BBC and ITV would have picked up on the fact that barely anyone here could get Central and BBC East Midlands, and put our local news on Look North and Calendar instead, but they never did. Less of an issue now of course with so many people on Virgin & Sky which defaults to East Midlands, but there's still plenty of people relying on terrestrial

re. Brekkie on page 5, I don't think the present government is going to turn the clock back in that way, because it is not really conservative in that sense, and the regional system was part of a post-war social democratic order that it has no real feeling for. This is why I said what I said on page 4.

If anything there would have been more of a chance of Labour under Corbyn doing it had they won power (as looked surprisingly likely, in retrospect, for quite some time) but even in that case there was barely a hint of the Third Programmery which survived on that side even when Corbyn was first an MP (which was the main reason why, to the utter disbelief of their white liberal patrons at the NME, people like Jazzie B & Morgan Khan supported elements of Thatcherism).

I think in reality our government (whoever they are at the time) are way too preoccupied with the BBC and whether or not to sell Channel 4 (that's bound to be back on the table with the furlough debt to pay) to worry too much about ITV.

I doubt the sale of C4 would make much of a dent in the £350 billion COVID-19 debt . . .

It might cover the interest payments for a week.