TVS Post-1993

Remember southern own the land where Maidstone is and sold it off to tvs for a nice profit.

That makes more sense as TVS Television Ltd received the income from the sale to Meridian rather than TVS Productions.

I have no idea if this will add detail or not, but here goes...
In 2006, I was working in playout at Red Bee. We were taking over the playout contract for the Flextech channels from Ascent Media, and were receiving a lot of tapes each day.

This BetaSP caught my eye for the logo on the label, so I took a picture. Can't tell you what the programme was (maybe Family Fortunes?) - but it does appear to be a tape which escaped Southampton.

It could be Family Catchphrase which was an original production for the Family Channel, and has been repeated within the last decade or so on Challenge.

The tapes used for Family Channel/Challenge TV would have been dubs made for Flextech and used to playout the channel. Their location hasn't been a mystery, they'll have followed its playout from Maidstone to Stephen Street to Red Bee and presumably now Sky.


It's the main TVS archive that's the mystery, though of course there will be copies of some of their programmes in the Challenge playout library (along with those of other broadcasters like Family Fortunes).

It's the same as, say, Gold. They don't play the BBC master tapes, they have their own versions in their own library and they'll be labeled 'UK Gold', 'UKTV' or whatever branding or name used when the copy/edit was made

This does complicate things how did stuff like family catchphrase or trival pursuit master tapes stay with flextech? Was that included in the sell off?

If Family Channel commissioned the show then why wouldn't it stay with them?


Which sell off are you asking about? When Family Channel UK was sold to Flextech it was just a purchase of remaining shares it didn't already own. Nothing physically would have changed

Off-topic - but that explains why UKTV continue to TX older versions of shows that have since been remastered? (Though I'm not sure what happens to shows remastered with BBC WW funding - and whether the remasters are then just the property of BBC WW or become available for general sales use. I'm thinking of the HD Joan Hickson Miss Marples for instance)

Considering it's a Family Channel tape, the preface "Family" isn't particularly helpful.

I haven't watched it for years but there were some programmes that still had break bumper slates with the 1998 UK Gold branding on them. They were edited onto their copy and as they faded in often a frame or two of it was seen before it cut away for the ad break.


I suppose to get an HD copy of a programme that you already have not only means getting the new copy but also re-versioning it the same. Programmes sold like that will not only be edited to put breaks in but sometimes there's edits for compliance reasons

It's pretty short sighted to edit something with the current brand on it. They could have easily done what they do now and use the programme's brand/theme tune.

I'm sure I've seen it discussed here before. From what I remember it was basically to make it easier to playout. In the days where there were programme specific end and beginning of part bumpers (EOPs and BOPs) they didn't need seperate slides before and after the breaks, they just put them onto the programme.

I'm sure I've seen UKTV EOP/BOP slides from the time without a channel name - as presumably they were intended to go out on Arena or Gold