Bring in the new TVS Production 1982 (includes the 1st TVS start-up announcer Malcolm Brown) 

Thanks.

@@ADCTVCollection Thank you too!!

I live in the London ITV region, but I remember visiting an aunt in Peacehaven, Sussex on the first day of TVS. I can clearly remember my aunt saying "everything has changed since yesterday, this is the new Southern TV". Funnily enough I was staying with a mate in the New Forest, Hants on TVS's last day and Meridian TV's first day, so I was there for the birth and death of TVS even though I lived outside its transmission area.

This is also interesting as the 9.55am Digby film here was mentioned on Southern Television the day before on one of their trailers-I have seen it on another upload now then so too. But of course they said it was on ITV-and not on TVS, whom they did not really like at all anyway! Thank you of course too.

Southern were just too self entitled,arrogant and stuffy. They deserved what they got for applying for the 1982-1992 ITV franchise for the area in the way that they did. Was genuinely gutted when TVS lost on the business plan. Sadly their financial calculations were right and in any case,the annual payments franchisees would have to make to the Treasury were then reduced post 1993 (GMTV notable for trying to get this to happen)

Yes they both did really of old of course now sadly so then too.

James Roberts Yes, when we used to visit my cousin in Devon ( when we used to live in East Sussex) we would pass it on the motorway. My sister and I would sing the theme from Coast to Coast in the car when we passed it.

Television Centre, Southampton. Also known as “The Dream Factory”.

Yes that was right then there so too of course. The studios used to be there indeed so too. But like a lot of other former ITV companies too, they were either later of course closed down or merged with other areas if not; all really because of ITV's now more national identity I guess so too then.

@@brucedanton3669 I believe the only studio complexes from the regional ITV days still owned by ITV PLC are Kirkstall Road in Leeds and Anglia House in Norwich. Both much truncated from their former selves.

the internet didn't exist then, so you couldn't lie to begin with.

@@sillygoose635 Actually the internet was created in 1982, but, it wasn't available to the general public until 1995. Back then reporters just reported the news as it came in be it local or national, we didn't have this 24 hour rolling news which was contested before it launched because it was thought that if you didn't have any news to report then the channels would start to make stuff up, which has happened on many occasions particularly with Sky News and the BBC I believe and both have been taken to task over it. I am glad that X and Facebook didn't exist then. Watching Will O The Wisp on TV and other childrens tv programmes, playing with my dolls and Playmobil that's what I was doing aged 6 in half when this was broadcast.

Southern Television were awarded the franchise in 1957 and came on the air in 1958

It might of been the Hannington transmitter or one of it's relays. link to a map of transmitters that covered the TVS region. www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0026/56195/meridian_v2.2.pdf

Girocopter develop by the late Wing Commander Ken Wallis who I knew and lived at Reymerston Hall just up the road from me in Norfolk. It was indeed on of his fleet if not thee actual one that featured in the James Bond Movie.

A lot of people in southern areas of Essex received their tv pictures from the Bluebell Hill transmitter in Kent which switched from London ITV to TVS the day TVS started broadcasting. The Dover VHF 405 line transmitter that switched from Southern to TVS also got a signal into parts of Essex, as far up and beyond Chelmsford and Clacton. I doubt that many people were still viewing black and white 405 lines by the time TVS went on air though.

As Trevor wrote, it depends what part of Essex. Parts of it were Thames/LWT. I distinctly remember receiving Thames/LWT when mum and dad lived in Harlow, and I remember my nan in Buckhurst Hill complaining she lost Thames/LWT and got TVS (by then we'd moved to Colchester which was definitely Anglia territory).

a "Prairie Oyster"

Other way around, mostly. ITV killed Meridian by cutting costs to the bone and insisting on a national identity.

Actually it goes back further than that. It goes all the way back to 1990 when the Broadcasting act was passed.

@@cjmillsnun Which was initiated by an European Council Directive in 1989, so technically Brussels started to interfere with the way we broadcast our television. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcasting_Act_1990#CITEREFConley1993

@user-kv7jd3pn8n: You can read about it on this wiki page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_South