What was your favorite regional ITV station growing up?

Also worth noting that even when FOX did arrive in October 1986, they were not a full network. Fox did not provide a networked prime time schedule on weekdays in the fall of 1986, just Saturdays and Sundays. Leaving the rest of the week up to the independent stations which joined the Fox affiliation in October 1986, which is why in many states there was no Fox affiliate at first, or sometimes the NBC, ABC or CBS affiliates would have "secondary" affiliation of Fox programming.


It would not be until around the mid 1990s that Fox became the full time network station, with a seven day prime time network schedule on offer

Who remembers when 24 hour television first launched, in 1987? During 1988, STV used their own presentation, basically the normal 1988 on Scottish idents, then a screen came up, and the caption "Through the Night" came on, with music. This would usually be when they couldn't sell the air time. I know Tyne Tees took the Granada service, and Yorkshire had their own service which someone else took. HTV had their own in vision continuity for their Night Club service, and Thames had IVC, with the likes of Patricia Yorston.

Who had the best through the night presentation, when 24 hour TV first launched?

Me! I remember being very jealous of Yorkshire TV as a Tyne Tees boy. Music Box, wasn't it?

Why could they have 24hr TV and not us? Not that I could have stayed up and watched it anyway because I was only 13!

Do you remember when a channel closing down past 2am felt like it was so late?

STV took a dirty feed of Granada's 'Night Time' for a while, but with their own continuity. There would often be accidental glimpses of the Night Time branding.

It was all down to money. A large station would make enough money out of advertising through the night to cover the costs of programming and manning the transmission department for those extra six hours, and make a profit.

The smaller stations wouldn't, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming in some cases to start offering services.

If it's going to lose money and provides no licence fulfilment, why bother?

Most of the companies who did take other contractors' services (mainly Granada) ended up inserting adverts until some sort of break-even point was met (usually 2 or 3am) and then either put out PIFs or just let things run out without adverts until 6am.

Bear in mind that a couple of the very small companies (notably Border and Ulster) had, for many years closed just after 11pm (where even the mid-sized companies were closing at nearly 1am), and indeed weren't opening until 10 or 11am on some days either, well into the 1980s.

The whole ITV network effectively doesn't bother any more, for similar reasons.

why doesn't it? this is still relevant to this day

Well, this sounds idiotic now, but I used to be absolutely fascinated by the schedules for overnight ITV in the Radio Times, reading the descriptions of these shows I knew I'd never see. When we had to get up at 3am to go on holiday one year, the most exciting bit for me was being able to see what Video View was finally like.

When I finally got my own video, I did get ro record some of these things. Turns out they were better in my imagination.

Errr, because there's no money to be made?

I did exactly the same Steve! The danger of 'programme title + fertile imagination + reality = crushing disappointment.

The one show that lived up to it's billing was Yorkshire's 'The James Whale Radio Show'. It slowly fell apart as the run and series progressed, but with a phone-in element, asking people to call in at 1.25 on a Saturday morning, with a few pints in them was always going to produce some car crash television moments - and neither Yorkshire or James hid away from that.

And it helped that with Radio Aire's studios and offices (where Whale was at the time) based, basically in a building at one end of the car park of the Yorkshire TV complex, it was ultra cheap tv - but great fun to watch.

As did TSW:

I used to love that show. Remember when Time Tunnel was shown before or after it (can't remember exactly which).

In answer to Steve Williams, I know exactly what you mean. Night time TV represented being a grown up and going to the pub.

I think we all must be of a similar vintage.

I have half an episode of The James Whale Radio Show from a VHS tape I purchased years ago at a car bootsale (when everyone was binning them to make way for DVDs) - the special guest is one Mr Jimmy Savile, who immediately makes a joke about bribing police officers to much studio laughter. I think it's from May 1990, but a bit of it can be seen on the PP as file 14734 - unfortunately in low resolution and out of sync audio due to the ancient computer I had when I uploaded it over a decade ago.

In a very different way, I have fond memories of ITV Night Time from the early 2000s! I was in my early teens at the time, but was fascinated by the odd selection of old low-budget 1990s programming ('Get Stuffed' especially which even then seemed archaic and from a different world) and ad-breaks made up entirely of Public Information Films, many of which were from the same era. Seemed like a few hours each night where the world hadn't moved on from circa 1993, and as a bonus there was Pages from Ceefax on the other side, reading Iraq War headlines in their 8-bit glory with retro-sounding music to send me to sleep.