What went wrong with night time

Thanks for those new unseen clips,



That is a shame about the 1998 clips!

Does anyone know what on earth Super - Spies was this is the second time I have come across this, I can;t found much info on it, ( the first time was the STV clip)

I do wonder how many real normal viewers in London realised that they were served by two different companies ?
Out here in North Hampshire where it was (less so now) about a 50/50 split of homes with CP or Hannington (Southern/TVS) aerials, I only ever heard Thames/LWT referred to as 'London ITV'.

You could argue a similar perception today, with most thinking 'GMTV' is the name of the ITV breakfast programme.

what about the fact that LWT and Thames did hate each other for most of the 1970s, and most of the time blanked each other

That may well be, but so what as far as the viewer was concerned ?

I have been able to found two of the answers to my questions.

* When Did STV started its 24 hour service early in 1988?
A: 15th February( Monday) it also took the short lived Granada/central overnight service to help get it going! it did add local presentation.

* Did any region apart from Central NOT take "Night Network"
A: No, anyone took bar Central. ( most areas never took it until September 1988)
----------------------------------------------------

There still a couple of more still to be found: any ideas?

* When Did Granada service get axed in 1995? It was still operating in May 1995 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh0tnuJxkJQ Which does give Granada the honer of having the longest running night time ident on ITV.

* Does any one have any more information on the following two service:
A: HTV/westcountry service 96 - 2000?
B: Anglia/ Meridian service 94 - 2000?
C: Of course of the 2 year service by Carlton from london 93 - 95

Following on from the London ITV comments, I've often thought that the dual-franchise system in place in London was probably in part responsible for the decline of the regions.

I agree that when I was in London the station was always referred to as ITV, never Thames or LWT. This contrasted sharply with experiences up until recently in the North East area. If there had only been one station in London I think the regional brand there would have been as strong as Granada's.

As it is, the suits only see what happens in the capital so they will have seen the local brands as anachronisms, even going back 20/30 years. The rest is history.

IF london was 7 days a week it would have become to powerful, and could have control most aspect of ITV.
This would result in lowering in quiltay of programming and could have seen lack of investment buy other ITV compaines.

MMM....... sounds a lot like what is happening right now, Maybe the ITB, and ITC where right

Mind you go back further, and the Midlands and North (NW and Yorks) all had two ITV companies weekdays/weekends, up until 1968. How was ITV's regional allegiance in those areas during the 50s and 60s ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFwXsGxPpRk

here is a clip of Meridian overnight service in 1993, looks so strange,

What's strange about it?

Meridian decide to bring back IN vision CA, just like what TVS did when it first started night service.

I believe this all stop when Anglia joined the service

The southern stations seemed to do that quite a lot.

You had an odd situation at one point where Thames, Anglia, TVS and HTV had OOV during the day and IV overnight, while Border, Grampian, Ulster, Tyne Tees and Granada had things the other way around.

STV and TSW bucked the trend in both cases, while only a small minority didn't bother at all.

That said, ISTR that Granada's Night Time played around with IVC a couple of times in the early days. I think there was a bit of it in Christmas 1988, and also for a few nights in Spring 1989 they had Colin Weston in a massive (for IVC) white set.

Pity it didn't continue really. I suppose that some of the regions that took the service might have objected -- all were dyed-in-the-wool IVC operators at that point and might have thought their identity would have been diluted by a separate set of personable announcers taking over after midnight.