Has Television quality declined?

RS

Rob_Schneider 30 August 2014 3:35pm

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?

The hour long news thing was a way of winning franchises in the 1993 round. The problem was, though, that there just wasn't enough news to warrant an hour long show in many cases. Elsewhere of course companies pledged sub-regional news after the Midlands had it mandated by the IBA in 1982. That said, I am always a bit surprised that Waltham and Belmont were not split off into a whole new franchise back in 1982. Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, for example, gets featured on Central News East, but it's served by Yorkshire Television. And certainly Lincolnshire would be better served from Nottingham than Leeds.

RI

Richard 30 August 2014 3:39pm

623058 posted:

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?

UTV kept hour long news until 1999 when ITV News moved to 6:30. In fact for some of the following years there was an hour long programme from 5:30, other times, the programme at 5:30 was billed as "UTV Life" and was nominally seperate. I think this was axed about 5 years ago.

RS

Rob_Schneider 30 August 2014 6:51pm

Yep, that's correct. To accommodate this, when ITV moved Crossroads to 5:30 (against Neighbours, clever thinking guys) UTV still had it at 5pm, presumably taped from network at lunchtime. When Night and Day started it moved to 1:10pm, a day behind the network whose lunchtime showing went out at 2:10pm (after Neighbours, which was actually a clever piece of thinking).

UTV Life was presented from a sofa from what I can remember from the early days of having all the regions on Sky, a feature that lost pretty much all its novelty fairly quickly due to the rebrand of the English and Welsh regions. It was, however, useful to me as a Night and Day fan as I was able to watch it on Friday nights on Scottish and not have to stay up until an ungodly hour on Thursdays instead when it got moved to something like half twelve in the morning.

PE

Pete Founding member 31 August 2014 9:43am

Are people mentioning Crossroads Mark 3 in a thread about the decline of TV?

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jamesison/x-r/x-r-record.jpg

RS

Rob_Schneider 31 August 2014 11:18pm

I wondered when one of those would get dug up! Kudos for inventing the meme before it was even called a meme though. But niche can't work in the daytime, especially in 2003 when jobs were actually quite plentiful. Daytime probably only performs well now because we have so many pepole unemployed.

(August 2014)