Thames strike

7am actually. It was a bank holiday.

Unlike in 1987 all three of the London based ITV companies were under the same roof, so a lot fewer options for a decampment.

In the GMTV incident you mention the regional structures were still fairly intact, and some regions put out announcements or captions explaining the absence of GMTV. They technically probably shouldn't have (see also UTV opting out of GMTV and the consequences of that) but in the circumstances I suspect it was probably seen by all concerned as doing a favour for GMTV in keeping the punters informed, and I don't think there were any repercussions.

Yes, though whether that was their pre-arranged place to go in an emergency or decided on the night. They seemed to use a shot of the edge of a tape box or similar for the TVam logo into the breaks so if it was pre-arranged then they didn't have much organised.

As I mentioned earlier, Thames was literally just down the road from TVam in Camden Town

Once they got the studios back up and running at Camden Lock, they kept Richard Keys at Euston Road in case anything else went wrong.

One thing about the Thames strikes, where they started later in the day, concerns advertising. What happened to the money for the slots already paid for between 12:00 and say 13:30? If Thames weren't on air, and so the adverts couldn't be shown, did the advertisers get their money back, or get a slot another day free instead?

And it did, I think it went back off air about about half an hour to 45 minutes. The recording I've seen (timecoded from the TV-am master tape) cuts off abruptly at that point.

I don't think it's a simple as that, as the advertisers will have paid for slots based on the schedule that didn't appear, e.g. the break in the middle of Coronation Street, not a ten year old American import. A special arrangement must surely have been in place.

Yes, that's the one. The recording doesn't start until about 40 minutes in- I presume that's when they got power back at Camden Lock and were able to start recording? Notice shortly after they hand back to Gordon Honeycombe at Camden there's a picture roll and the clock disappears, I presume that's them changing the recording source from recieving off-air (presumably the only way they could record the Euston output?) to a clock-less studio feed (off air recordings on YouTube from the day still have the clock on there- I've noticed on the master TV-am archive recordings it actually seems to vary whether the clock's there or not).

I'm guessing the whole morning's output continued to be fed through Thames, even after going back to Camden? Would have made going back to Richard Keys after the power went out again at 8:16. I wonder if there's any official archive recordings of the sections missed when the power was out at Camden? I can imagine things were so hectic it's quite likely nobody at Euston Road thought to put a tape in.

I wonder how many people were there at all. Seems it was only a few months after they went 24 hours, before that they might not have had the option of using Thames.


Further off topic but anyone know how they were affected overnight? Was it just off air completely 's Crystal Palace was out? I know LBC had to broadcast from a radio car that morning as their studios were affected by the power cuts. Thames and Capital were next door to each other at the time of course