Split Personality

In the late 1980s or early 1990s, there was a situation where a film began during Thames broadcasting hours one Friday, and finished during LWT's time, and I believe the changeover happened during the film. I'm sure the video is on youtube of the ad breaks, and the description of the video makes mention of that.

Presumably a Good Friday, or a Friday in Christmas week then - good find either way!

Indeed, just as Southern TV ceased broadcasting at 00:45 on Jan 1 1982, not 23:59:59. Dec 31 1981

I think it’s unique to the UK, and goes against every PVR that’s in use today, and every VCR from the outset

Well - to be fair - internally UK broadcasters have (or had) the concept of 2500, 2600 etc. as schedule times when a show was broadcast after midnight, but before closedown and thus scheduled/billed on the previous day.

Happened routinely towards the end of ITV regional identities. Carlton would introduce Home and Away, the centre break world have LWT bumpers.

Yes that happened occasionally and regularly with Home and Away in the last year of Thames - it started at 17:10 and 5 minutes in the switchover happened and the ad break was LWTs. Either one company fed it down the line to the other or they both had copies, I'm not sure.

As MarkyMark says it continued when Carlton took over, but as it was coming from the same playout facility the only thing that changed at 17:15 was the teletext channel identifier and the ancillary text service

It's a bit different to midnight though to the example given at midnight - the companies wouldn't want to take over at midnight for a short period and then close down again till the morning.

Yes, and remember LWT would go into Monday morning, and once 24 hour running started right up to 6am (of course by then TV-am had the 06:00 to 09:25 slot)

Going back to pre 1968, I wonder if the GPO even had the ability to perform an instant line switch anyway ?
They were unable to perform that in some (all ?) regions outside London even by 1983, as evidenced by the 09:15 to 09:25 buffer zone between TV-am and ITV that existed for a while.

In the Midlands region I think ATV and ABC both played out from a joint facility in Birmingham (Alpha Studios ?) so the same situation as post 93 in London, (so LNN wasn't a new idea !), but in the north Granada Quay St and ABC Didsbury, and in London ATV Fowey St, and Rediffusion Wembley

Well, that was all super for the broadcasters I'm sure, but did nothing to alleviate the problem for the punters setting their VHS machines !
It's not nearly so bad now, because you tend to scroll forward on the PVR timelines to set a recording

Even though they've been held by the same company for quite some time now, Ofcom still issue separate licences for London Weekday and London Weekend. The timings for the latter are still

The licencee for all the ITV licences (save for the two Scottish ones and UTV) is ITV Broadcasting Ltd, which is the successor company to Anglia Television.

I wonder why they chose Anglia Television to become ITV Broadcasting Ltd? (I guess using existing companies to become the new sections of the company made sense?)

First one in an alphabetical list?