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Looking at that clip, I wonder if that little wobble at the start is TVam being switched to line or the the transmitter site switching from black to incoming?

I'd have thought there wouldn't have been any precise switching of the network at 6am in the early days, nothing was being broadcast anyway and the transmitters were all switched on by the IBA in the morning. They could have just done all the switching overnight once the ITV company had closed down.

That IBA slide and music is almost certainly from TVam itself

IIRC they had the right to broadcast from 6am (although I seem to recall reading somewhere it was actually 5:55am for startups and test cards and whatever else).

Mind you, that being said, this is from 1987 and you can see pages from Jobfinder (presume this is Central as it makes mention of Birmingham) before it crashes into TV-am on this occasion for a 6:15 start, and if you watch the timings Mike Morris speaks at exactly 6:15am:

I think Jobfinder was only a Central thing wasn't it? I think they just left it on their output and went home.

And at that stage they were one of, if not the only station that stayed on air all night? Presumably there was a special arrangement there to make sure that there was no gap in 'programming' (if you can call Jobfinder that). Once proper 24 hour TV started across the network presumably TVam went to a fixed 6am start?

Yorkshire had Jobfinder too.

I can offer some evidence to support the theory that the IBA slide came from Eggcup House, I've seen an image of it complete with the Christmassy border TV-am were using one year, possibly on TV Ark.

Did the start up still use the GMB/Daybreak themes at the weekend?

The fact that there always seems to be a nice clean transition between it and their ident suggests it's from them.

But also, where else would it come from? They'd either have to reconfigure everything twice - once to put the slide to air and then to put TVam to air.... or put a copy and music at each transmitter site. Easier just to have it come from TVam, it's their airtime anyway


I assume the Jobfinders were some special arrangement with the Dept for Employment or whatever handled that back then and so was allowed at a time when 24 hour TV wasn't a thing

At one time you could search the Moving Image site for TV-am archive holdings, and there were numerous video clips of various bits, and a couple of those videos had the IBA slide on it, which shows it came from TV-am themselves.

This video suggests it did:

Technically by 1983 things like that were done from the IBA's ROCs (of which there were 4) rather than the transmitters themselves (that's where ETP-1 came from), though you're right that it would still have been an unnecessarry complication- especially in the first few months where the switching was done manually (and you had a 10 minute gap between the end of TV-am and the start of the ITV companies because of that).

Just going back to the Barrymore clips, a lot of the naffness was the song choices- they were obviously current at the time (give or take a couple of years with the Backstreet Boys). If Brucie broke out into song it would be to do a classic (although he did do a sort of rap on the underrated theme tune for Takeover Bid).

It would be as weird as seeing Bradley Walsh suddenly attempting a Drake or Little Mix hit today

Even then there’d be a kind of deliberate “ironic” way of doing it today, designed for an online viral hit and making it as clear as possible that it’s just for laughs.

The great thing about the Barrymore clips is how utterly seriously they’re taken and sung, even the Backstreet Boys one.

ROCs? Care to elaborate please?

Jobfinder originally was Central only and I believe was on for an hour after closedown, however by 1987 they also repeated the programme in the hour before TV-am and would have closed down in between. I believe it only became an all night filler when Central started broadcasting Night Time programmes until about 3:00am.

I think Yorkshire were second with Jobfinder and used it as an all night filler after the Music Box experiment ended.

Tyne Tees also took on all night job finder by 1988, see this clip of it following closedown: