The TV-am strike

Seen by many as the strike that changed the way that television companies were run, forever, the TV-am strike was the longest on the ITV network since 1979. Anyone got any memories of it? I seem to recall one morning, watching it, and instead of news, it was a VT clock, and various slides.

It lead to increase viewership

I remember not wanting it to end (forgive me I was a child ) because I was enjoying the reruns of stuff like Batman and thought this was much better than the normal output.

Other than that I can not remember much about it.

Essentially the technical unions walked out, leading to most of the technical staff spending transmission time outside the building. TV-am promtly sacked them but they stayed outside, while management and office staff tried desperately to keep the station on the air. TV-am was apparently almost bankrupted in the process. Unlike the big ITV strike of 79 when the channel simply came off air, TV-am decided to stay on-air and continue with programmes themselves. It was apparently the first time a station made programmes without unionised technical support. By all accounts it lead to some quite farcical output which apparently did lead to an increase in viewers, enjoying the car-crash telly. It is widely acknowledged in TV history as a very bitter dispute indeed, but is in keeping with what had happened to the miners and what was about to happen to Fleet Street. It's a fascinating chapter in British employment history!

This clip on youtube isn't exactly comprehensive but it gives a good enough description in a couple of minutes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fvb-WOcKNU&feature=related

There was a website put together by one of the sacked technicians which told the inside story about the first few years of TV-am and the dispute. It's called the-234.com but it seems to have disappeared, however the Archive.org cache of it exists here: http://web.archive.org/web/20021211183533/www.the-234.com/interest.htm
An interesting read if you've an hour or so (and if you can stand the awful layout of the site!)

I don't know about that, the strike started in November but Bruce Gyngell said that they could easily keep the management-run service going indefinitely, I think they had enough advertising to keep going until at least March. It's not entirely the case that ratings rocketed during the strike, it's often been said but in fact they started fairly constant - adults switched off but loads more kids switched on because obviously all the boring news was replaced by Batman.

My first memory of the TVam strike is the Wide Awake Club being a repeat and, in the ad breaks, Tommy Boyd came on to tell us it was a repeat so you shouldn't write in about anything. Initially there was no live programming at all, just repeats, but after a week they were able to do half an hour of live output a day, then an hour and by February they'd managed to get the repeats down to an hour a day and were broadcasting live for the other two and a half, but it was still utterly shambolic.

TVam always had problems with the unions, when they started they weren't allowed to do any live shows at the weekend because the unions refused. But they did very well out of the strike, they made tons of money.

TV-am were the first to make Live programmes, but I think Thames may have been the first ITV station to broadcast using management staff back in 1984, this lead them to having no Live content at all, but they were still broadcasting from 1.00pm usually.

But it is widely acknowledged that the TV-am Strike was the end of union supremacy on TV, you never saw any full blown strikes after that.

And why did they walk out? Because the TV-am management stopped paying the agreed overtime and penalty payment rates. In what turned out to be a carefully orchestrated (and government backed?) move, TV-am scheduled the shifts of several key members of staff in such a way as to incur, under their conditions of service, huge extra payments, which the management then refused to pay. The result was industrial action, at which point the management dismissed the production and technical staff and pushed ahead with "Toytown TV". The technical and editorial standards of much of what they transmitted put them in clear breach of the standards required by the then regulator, the IBA, but no action was taken.

I'm not seeking to defend the worst excesses of the old ITV pay agreements, but I do feel that it's only fair to put a bit of background on the story of a dispute in which many people suffered badly.

was the strike and office staffe making the programme the cause of the crap reporting of the brighton bombing in 1984 or was that just crap reporting (no camera just a still of John Stapleton on the phone)

The strike wasn't because of the lack of coverage during the Brighton bombing. The strike had something to do with the amount of technical crew that were involved in the Caring Christmas campaign in Late 1987, but you'd be best reading up about that.

Although the IBA weren't too impressed by the lack of coverage of the Brighton bombing and ordered TV-am to beef up their News operation by January 1985, Gyngell himself said to the IBA you may aswell shut down TV-am the next day as that would be impossible, instead they heavily invested in the News operation to have a more professional service running by February 1986. People slagged off TV-am in those days, but between that point and when they lost the franchise in October 1991 they had a high quality News service.

A documentary was made called 'Storm in an Eggcup' that was broadcast on BBC2 in 1992, and it was on YouTube until the uploader's account was shut. If it was still online it's worth a watch.

Thank you very much for sharing that link, it's been a most interesting couple of nights read. Quite shocking behaviour from TVAM's management all-in-all!

It would have had live content, just none from Thames