TV-am sign-off, switch and Central startup | 20 May 1983 

The glitch looks more like a problem with the tape that recorded it, or a tiny bit of interference from somewhere near the receiver. The actual switch would more likely have been done during the black screen between the two IBA cards, so it wouldn't interrupt the music or cause any noticeable jumps in the image.

Remember him from time bandits

Yes they had to vacate Elstree once Lenton Lane in Nottingham was up and running. However the first series of Blockbusters and Auf Wiedersehen Pet in 1983 and the fifth series of Family Fortunes (by which time Bob Monkhouse had gone back to the Beeb, and Max Bygraves was now host) were filmed at Borehamwood

They weren't in Lenton Lane initially - they operated from an industrial park in Giltbrook until Lenton Lane was up and running.

Anthony Hobson That was the plan for the news only, however they initially didn't because of industrial disputes. The first east midlands Central news not till September '83 over a year after Central started. Until then the news all came from Broad Street. Other programming came from Broad Street and Elstree until Lenton Lane was ready.

And all that and for what? All that money spent closing down Elstree and redundancy to make way for studios in Nottingham that didn't last 20 years. The IBA and their pompous Lord and Lady's Haven't Got a Clue should have been got rid of entirely long before the late 1980s. It wasn't just ATV, then Channel 4 entertaining no-one and then no adverts, TV-am (a franchise that should never have been awarded to them) and BSB (must be in D-Mac, waste millions on dishes that won't work and then get totally destroyed by Murdoch who just jumped on a Luxembourg satellite).

@@robertcomer2767 what a lot of bollocks. C4 had a lot of entertaining programming, they had a lot of crap too. It was no different to the other 3 stations starting up. BBC1 started as a part time service. BBC 2 was the alternative to general news and films (eg the arts, literature reviews and what became documentary programming). ITV became the semi-independent (highly restricted/regulated) equivalent to BBC1 with a heavy focus on regional programming and a commitment to regionally made for national viewing programs. The rules for the franchise's were very strict to prevent what we have now since the IBA and DTI were devolved and OFCOM replaced them. The franchise owners could not own too large a share in the other media groups and branches of the media, this meant no one group could own most of the major newspapers, a large share of local papers and too many cinemas and radio stations. Now OFCOM has taken all of the restrictions away there isn't anything independent anywhere, the local papers are owned by 2 groups, the news in every region is typically 15% relevant to the area, and then 85% the same generic story passed around the region's usually with the same stock images. The ITV regions are all the same and most are owned by the same group who happens to own sky and most newspapers, either in part or whole. Thank you Tories! As for BSB, the technology was early days and dmac was quite good in the end, if Murdock hadn't sold pirated BSB cards and hardware using 3rd party hackers and financially crippled them, they'd have done well. Now we have 0 competition there as well. He / they tried the same crap with Freeview but was caught out. Slap on wrist for that. The IBA put strict restrictions in place to protect people from a monoculture of media who could pump their own brand of propaganda, and they were evidently right to do so. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. Put you TV on now and tell me you can find something worth owning a TV for on those 600 channels. The comedy isn't funny the News is predictable, and nothing is worth watching because we don't make films any more and American films are just bad remakes, or sequels of bad films.

The final closedown with the gap was 22nd May 1983 (a Sunday). Last time I heard the Tyne Tees TV start-up music Three Rivers Fantasy

This explains why Central reinstated a two-minute schools standby the following week, ie. Slide and clock.

I'm still searching for the first song, even I enter Usample, where I found one of the ITV Schools Clock themes (Chateaux, FRANCE BRR1), and nothing, that song its stuck on my head.

@@eduardomurcia9940 Its Steve Gray - Going Places from Bruton LP BRN3 (Going Places)

@@far78 Thank you, thank you very much. Greetings from El Salvador 🇸🇻🇬🇧

I'm looking for the song at 8:21. SoundHound returns no results

​@@GeorgeLiquor For I know is a custom in house soundtrack, but somebody uploaded like a master recording of the Central Start-ups, ID's and Closedown Themes. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ratnpDqg5Hs.htmlsi=sEx81jThln8Yy0Cl

And Johnathan Aitken chuckling away to himself!!

That's how I remember things post January 82, and in a lot of cases a trimmed down Zoom 2 with no "In Colour" section. I wonder why they didn't just replace the ident with the Central one, which they did on some other ATV productions (the last Sapphire and Steel shown in 1982 for example)

The new Good Morning Britain sucks though

+Kris Starring Well, Margaret said in a private note to Bruce Gyngell, which he read out loud to a journalism awards ceremony, that she was heartbroken when TV-am lost their franchise.

@@RetroGUY77 nah it doesn't, aside from piers morgan

Further to that, Jim Stokoe has said that he and Pete Bennett wrote the theme, and Mike Moran arranged and produced it.

Frontcaps started to disappear around 1988 before the Generic ITV branding exercise in September 89. Central appeared to get round this by using an animated endcap for a short time.

Indeed, I believe it was around 1986ish when they introduced the 3D "cake" logo.

@@keda1981 Actually September 1985.

In fairness, what else were you going to switch to back in the day? You'd go and do the hoovering instead, or something like that.

TV is not crap today.

Because technically the original franchise hours still exist despite the merger of the regions into a handful of companies.

Convention. It was probably part of the (historical and soon to be scrapped) IBA rules for how to do startups, like the authority announcement, the slide and the startup music.

ATV did not lose its franchise. It won with major conditions attached.

+Kelvin Oabina TV-am aired from 6am to 9.25am, 7 days a week, from February 1983 until December 1992 (although it sometimes came on air a bit later - 6.30am or 7am - in the early days when it ran out of money).

Running out of Money?

Kelvin Oabina Yes. TV-am very nearly went bankrupt in its first year - high setup costs plus a lack of advertisers and viewers almost sank it. That's why the (expensive) group of Ford, Rippon, Key etc were jettisoned and replaced by the (cheaper and more popular) faces of Nick Owen and Anne Diamond. Eventually TV-am recovered and even went into profit - only to be felled by the long strike/lockout that hit them later. It would then take them a long while to recover from that financially too.

Let me say this again: TV-am aired 7 Days a Week from 6-9:25am UK Time. (2-5:25pm Philippine Time) It was aired from February 1983-December 1992.

+Kelvin Oabina Yes. It was a separate television station that broadcast on our main commercial television network ITV (which, at the time, was made up of 15 separate television stations covering different parts of the country). It was replaced in January 1993 by GMTV. ITV's separate stations then mostly merged into one, which calls itself 'ITV', and together they owned a majority share of GMTV, so they closed the station down and replaced it with a programme - Daybreak (re-using the name of TV-am's news programme) - and then a different programme - Good Morning Britain (re-using the name of TV-am's magazine programme). The current Good Morning Britain programme on ITV only runs on weekdays; both TV-am and GMTV ran all week long, from 6am to 9.25am every day.

Applemask “No, apart from that drunk guy who lives in a pub.”

My money is on the very slight image glitch at 4:27. I believe Central took a feed of the IBA card from an internal feed of TV-AM via the GPO network and then after control of the transmitters was switched to Central, Central faded the TV-AM feed out before putting up their local IBA card.

One was coming from London, the other from Birmingham.

R Wright It is indeed the late David Rappaport, you're right.

Small Sketches and Older Stuff From what's being said here, it occurs at 4:30 as the switch is automatic at Central in Birmingham by this point, allowing Central to fade out the IBA caption from BT Tower and cut to their own copy of the IBA caption instead, for what would be the third-from-last time.

In fact, elsewhere on Transdiffusion, there is the IBA Engineering Announcement from earlier in the week where they say that the entire ITV network was now covered by automatic switching.

What apart from the fact they showed a close up of it?

In general most people would have switched over (or off) after TVAM with only Schools programming at 9:25. There wasn't any normal programming until the preschool programmes at midday.

@@michaelmcdonald2348 Think it was similar for the BBC wasn't it?