Presumably there were some technical changes in terms of splitting off the South East and East Midlands but these could just be done in the 8 hours of closedown if need be
The Bluebell Hill transmitter was 'rewired' from London to TVS during those 8 hours, but the Tunbridge Wells
relay wasn't done until during the day on Monday Jan 4th, (the first proper working day back after the Christmas/NY break)
The Franchise announcements were made I think on Sunday 28th December 1980, chosen because the IBA were worried that announcing the results on a weekday would cause instability on the markets
Was there any particular reason why those that lost their franchises in 1980 didn't finish at midnight Jan 1st 1982 or did the franchise just expire at the end of normal programming at however minutes past midnight that came?
By this stage, ATV and Westward were Central and TSW in all but name - but in the days before 24 hour television I'd imagine between closedown and startup was no mans land, so it didn't really matter what time the old stations came off air.
I wonder how funny Westward found that Television Programme episode when the call came through.
Any videos about unsuccessful applicants? In the South and South East region there was one company headed by Freddie Laker and another called Network South that wanted five small sub regions centred around each of the transmitters. Granada had Mersey Vision as it's one and only competitor. London Independent Broadcasting stood against both Thames and LWT. Severn Television contested the Wales and west of England region. STV had competitors but Grampian was unopposed - the opposite of 1991.
Issue with the 80's to the 90's was that you didn't have the press and pr experts (Carlton) or belligerent self publicity merchants (Branson/Frost and MIA) ready to appear on screen with a dummy copy of the bid documents for the cameras.
And, not sure the IBA would have really wanted a publicity storm by the unsucessful applicants. Even more that they did have to give the loosers any reason why they lost..
...did I
completely miss
the moment when the Westward/TSW handover was finally found?! That was a holy grail of lost TV for years, I've only ever heard it as a low-quality audio recording before (PP file 10695, complete with my comments from age 17) before. Amazing to finally see it.
Always thought the actual TSW ident was played at the handover, rather than a (slightly bizarre) closeup of someone's champagne erupting. Explains the odd 'pop' sound at least which I assumed for years was just ambient noise from the audio recorder's house...the audio at least reveals that the full ident was played just after, linking into the Peter Cook movie.
I think I have only ever heard the Westward handover to TSW too. Very strange transition indeed. The bit that cracks me up the most is when someone shouts "Jolly good!" after their slug of champers. Interesting newspaper articles from the period too, thank you. Amusing that the best (and almost only) thing they can find to say about Westward is that it gave Angela Rippon her first break.
