Split Personality

Yes, maybe Anglia was chosen purely because it was first alphabetically?


What happened was that Anglia became ITV Broadcasting and then bought all the others. This is detailed in their financial report for 2006. Page 1 has about the purchases and page 20 lists the companies subsidiaries:
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00955957/filing-history/MDE4MjczNzcxOWFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0q

Maybe this came in with widespread introduction of computed assisted scheduling and transmission? Where I worked the schedule, which was manually executed, always reverted to 00.00.00 at midnight. This would have been pre-1993.

The pre-1968 schedule is what it was. Every minute of time was accounted for by the authority. The same for post 1968.

I remember watching a handover of Thames to LWT in around mid 1980s and the presenter waffled on for too long, that she was cut off mid sentence and went straight into LWT ident.

I think I read of an occasion when it went the other way, and the switch didn't happen on time. Luckily the next programme happened to be being fed to Thames, so Philip Elsmore (or whoever happened to be on duty) busked his way into the programme

I believe the event in question was during Bedknobs and Broomsticks, shown on Christmas Day 1987. The film began at 4.35pm on Thames and ran up to 6.45pm.



For the pre 1968 situation, I’d recommend listening to Transdiffusion’s soundcloud channel which has the odd example of Granada (and I think ABC) closing down at the end of their allotted time, with it near enough closing down at midnight exactly on the Friday night.

The 5:15 Friday split between Thames and LWT is also the reason why the childrens programmes finished at about 5:14pm. Give Thames a chance to say goodbye, and allow the formal handover to LWT.

What if a sporting event, such as a rugby world cup match, straddled the 5:15 Friday split. How would that have been handled?

The only place I've seen it is on paperwork from scheduling. It never made it as far as the computers doing the actual playout out of the channel as they were off the shelf products that worked in normal 24 hour clock, nor the schedule that went to the public

I suspect it was/is just a BBC thing

Play was stopped, the players changed into their LWT kit and the game then continued.

Actually its documented Thames would opt out of the final CITV junction on a Friday because of 5:15pm and this was happening in 1991 and 1992 at least and presumably before that.



Presumably ads as usual (to Thames and LWT as appropriate) but remember on screen you probably wouldn't have noticed anything, both companies would have probably had a feed and TV sets were more forgiving of a sync change, its only the nature of VCR recordings on YouTube that give the impression it was messier than it was.

That's probably because the THS/LWT circuit switch at the PO tower was automated to happen bang on
17:15:00, either that or BT's router control system clock was running fast

The switch still occurred at 17:15:00, it would have been a simple case of Thames and LWT both feeding BT with the same output of whatever the programme was. Don't forget also the C4 London feed also switched at 17:15:00 Friday too, with a mid programme splat in whatever they were showing. In the early days of C4, The Tube started bang on 17:15, and often the CA leading into it was the C4 clock, it looked like a non sync cut to the programme to Londoners !