What ever happened to?...

I was going through some old magazines that I have and came a cross a satellite tv magazine from March 1997, Looking back in it there was lots of old channel's on analouge satellite back then, but i wondering what happened to these particular channels:

Granada Talk TV
Granada TV High Street
Granada Food and Wine
Granada Health and Beauty
Granada Home and Garden


For those who have not heard of those granada channels above, these were not made-up channels, they were part of the new Granada TV Package when Granada Plus launch, but it looks like that Granada Plus has only survived!. Can someone tell me what happened to all those Granada Channels plase?.

They basically all closed down!
I think Health and Beauty relaunched as "Wellbeing", but didn't last long.

Basically, nobody watched.

I remember Talk TV had this brilliant ident sequence, really good music and stuff. So if anyone could direct me to a video, it would help me relive my days as a boy watching United Artists/Telewest cable.

I remember when they did test's for these channel's and instead having adverts they had the old Analog Sky Music In the backround with the 1997 Sky Logo on the screen.

The old purple Granda Plus ident was a favourite of mine. All the Granada channels started with the same style of "Granda Sky Broadcasting" animation with the big G but in their channels colours before fading out to something that was relevant to the channel - Plus' were purple curtains with various characters on them.

All the channels had very nice idents - suitably corporate but different enough.

I can't remember Men and Motors' original ident, but the others were fantastic, there were two versions of the Granada Plus ident, a short one with the family gorping at the G Curtain, and the other one without the family and instead the announcer waffles on. There were too many Granada Good Life Idents, and I agree the Talk TV ident was fantastic.

I do have some of these idents on video, but the best I can do is upload a WAV File, if anyone wants to hear some of them.

I thought it was a shame that on the last day of Granada Talk TV they had to show Sky News, though it was the day Diana died, I even remember Granada Plus showing Sky News at times of the day. Though I remember ads in 1996 which heavily promoted the service, they even had a page on Granada Text dedicated to it.

Granada TV High Street was closed down in advance of the imminent launch of Shop, Granada's joint shopping channel venture with Littlewoods.

Most of the remits of the other channels were collected together to form a single new channel, Granada Breeze, which then closed down in 2002.

The GSkyB network now only consists of Granada Men&Motors and Granada Plus. Both however have now lost their Granada branding, Men&Motors lost it way back (at least 3 years ago), Granada Plus rebranded about a year ago as Plus TV. Although Granada Sky Broadcasting still exists atm, there are talks of bSkyb divesting themselves of their share of it, and of Granada then incorporating it into ITV plc (with Plus TV rumoured to become ITV Gold).

Well from what I remember I thought it was just a simple case of rebranding for Granada Good Life, by introducing new programmes which wern't in fixed slots or anything like that, I even remember they were going to call it Granada Home and Garden, but became Breeze, but it was pratically the same format, all original shows coming from Manchester. Plus Breeze only came on air in May 1998 and Shop! only came on in November 1998. And it was out of place for a couple of months as Plus and M&M had already recieved their new idents, which were crap.

I remeber NTL: or C&W or maybe EVEN Nynex then had to come around to your house to program those Granada channels on the old Jerold boxes.

::Wellbeing


Wellbeing was a seperate unrelated channel, owned by Boots. iirc...

Yeah thats why Boots website was www.Wellbeing.com for a bit.

I didn't know they did that, when we got Nynex in 1997, about August or so, we already had the channels there, labelled, GRNG, GRNP and GRNT and at the time they were really cool. But all I remember for a while was the channels which had the Nynex Engineering Notice Caption being on all day with some German Radio station, asking us not to switch off the boxes as they were going to add Paramount Comedy and The Weather Channel and the movement of Performance to TV5 and the movement of Sky Soap and History to Granada Talk and The Christian Channel (Now The God Channel) being moved to Eurosport and the removal of Sky 2 and the funnt thing was they made a big fuss of this!