Has Television quality declined?

I see what you did there.

Tate! Superb.

Not really, the regions that showed Home and Away at six were still able to show Blockbusters in its familiar 5.15 slot, and those that didn't were able to show it at 6.30, so it was barely affected. What did affect it was that in 1993 various regions had committed to an hour of regional news so there wasn't room for both that and Home and Away and Carlton had to show Blockbusters at 3.20 with the subsequent dip in ratings. But for four years they happily co-existed.

The only areas to broadcast Blockbusters at 5.10 were Central, Anglia and Thames, The ratings where already dipping with the move between 1990 - 1993. A number of areas reduced the number of episodes broadcast on top of that. The Saturday screening was scraped aswell ( note a few brought it back at 12.30 to make up the quoter)

This resulted in a number of areas having a huge backlog of episodes to broadcast. Carlton had to broadcast it every weekday for six months straight, Grampian did it for the whole year and may not even completed the series. HTV and Westcountry: did the same for about seven months.

The news thing was just a easy exit door, only west country kept hold of its hour long news, the rest were back to 30mins pretty quick. 1994?

Thinking about it, a Crossroads revival of sorts would have been good for the Heartbeat slot on a Sunday night.

A less piss-taking, toned-down and generally sobered-up incarnation of the Yvon Grace reboot would definitely have worked. Combining the plots of series 2 with the escapist house style of series 3 could have worked as a 1 hour Sunday night drama.

Series 3 was visually brilliant and had we had HD at the time would have looked stunning on screen... but the writing, casting and characters were just awful. To this day, I honestly don't know what Yvon Grace was trying to achieve. The network and Carlton gave her one job: increase viewers. You do not do that by creating a niche product. I am amazed that nobody high up at Carlton saw the elephant in the room and stopped it getting to air.

If you change a soap, you do it gradually. Emmerdale is a great case in point. It wasn't all sheep and pig-muck on Thursday then plane crashes, the Dingles and gunpoint sieges on Tuesday. It evolved gradually from a sleepy rural drama into what it became over several years. The transition of power from the Tates to the Kings was gradual, which it wasn't for the Russells to the Sampsons.

Quickly on the STV arrangements for Emmerdale... Did they show episodes a couple of hours before the rest of the network or were they taping it from the network feed and playing them out a day or two behind?

I believe that generally speaking they were showing them the same night as the rest of the network, therefore a couple of hours in advance of everyone else.

According to me, consumer's first demand is always picture quality and then they came on economic services. If they found out of their budget, at that instance, a service provider is always available with the useful offers that makes consumers to be a part of it for sure.

Could you imagine that nowadays in the era of social media? Any decent cliff-hanger would get spoilt ahead of TX for most of the country. Interesting they did that though.

There is nothing to stop STV or UTV broadcasting soaps earlier if need be, again there nothing stopping ITV pushing out stuff before STV or UTV gets a chance to reslot it.

UTV moved Crossroads to early lunchtimes at one point and were consequently a day behind the network, complete with an out of date version of the credits being slapped on to mask the ECP on the version they'd taped from the network the previous day!

In the case of Home and Away's moveable feast evening showings, I believe the lunchtime showing was networked (and before 1993 played out by Thames) and regions simply taped that, playing it out locally somewhere between 5 and 7.