Battle of Northern ITV V Southern ITV

Yep - in the days before servers (Profile's arrival in the mid-90s was a real game-changer), you either had to get a cloned tape in advance, arrange a line-feed in advance (and record it locally), or as you say, do the tape-delay shuffle. Which was horrible, and even more horrible the shorter the delay and the longer the programme. You needed three VTRs (any of which could be timecode slaved to each other), and someone running them who knew how long they took to rewind, and didn't push their luck in that regard... I'm not sure if the Nations did this that often, if at all, but network did when they needed to delay a live event (though it was usually a BBC Events AP who did the delay, not a pres person ISTR)

There were attempts in the 60s and 70s to do short delays by looping tape between two VTRs - but the reality was for significant delays you used multiple VTRs.

If you had a decently designed operation you would do the following :

Record on one VTR, then start recording on a second VTR a good few minutes before you rewound the first ready to play in.

You would then start the first VTR playing in, whilst the second was still recording.

Once you were close to hitting the end of the recording currently playing on the first VTR, would start a third VTR recording.

You could then stop the second VTR, rewind the second VTR to close to where the first VTR was currently playing, and if you were lucky you'd be able to slave the timecode of the second VTR to the first VTR.

You'd then have one VTR about to finish, but playing in sync with the second which was at the beginning of its recording.

You'd have the third still recording.

You'd hot switch from the first VTR to the second VTR, and if they were properly timecode locked nobody would see the join.

The second VTR would then be on-air.

You could rewind the first VTR (or change tape spools), and start recording on it again when the third VTR was coming to the end of it's allocated chunk.

You'd then rewind the third VTR, lock it to the second VTR, hot switch from the second VTR to the third VTR (whilst the first VTR was back in record)... And repeat.

As you can imagine this was VERY easy to mess up. It was also a lot easier if you were delaying by a large amount of time and not a short amount of time, as you had fewer changeovers.

You HAD to know how long a VTR took to rewind and how quickly it could be locked. This is a skill probably nobody really has these days, and very few had back in the day...

There must be stories of that going horrendously wrong?

It wasn't that common, and the people who were called on to do it were very good at it, so although I've heard of 'near misses' and 'tight squeaks', I can't remember hearing of any major disasters.

It was a pretty tricky thing to do on a BBC broadcast (where there are no helpful ad breaks - unlike the US or ITV) and there were a core team of Events bods who really knew how to do it. If you do the maths and have a strict, well thought-out plan, it will work.

Back in the 1970s, BBC 1 Network would show Star Trek at 20:10hrs on Monday, but BBC 1 Wales time-shifted it to Sunday afternoons. I recall a holiday in Wales, and I was watching Star Trek all over again (yes, I know !) as the credits rolled the original voice over from the network showing said, '...and Star Trek is back at the same time, next Monday evening', followed straight away by the Welsh CA saying, '....and here on BBC Wales next Sunday afternoon at....."

Northern Ireland occasionally had something to think about with Neighbours, which they time shifted to after the Six. As it was recorded from the dirty feed they had to crash into the titles to avoid Edd the Duck noises etc.

When time shifting network programmes in tape days, would they add a VT clock (via a physical splice?) or just rely on time code on playback to cue it up?

That also led to a really odd way of introducing the Six O'Clock News (as it was back then) - the BBC1 clock would appear on a monitor while the Inside Ulster presenter was still closing the programme, followed by the Six's opening titles, which NI would then crash into mid-way.

Would it not have made more sense for them to record the lunchtime showing and play this back (unless it tended to have a VOEC when the 5.35 showing didn't)?

Wasn't the lunchtime showing a repeat of the previous evening's ?

I would think almost certainly the latter ? Physical splicing was only a thing from the Quad era, and used very sparingly (playing the tape over splice points was like hitting the heads with a hammer, and would shorten their life)

No. I think what happened was that the Lunchtime showing was the same as the evening one. In the early days, when it was shown in the morning and the afternoon, with no evening broadcast, the morning edition was a repeat of the afternoon before. After it was moved to 17:35, or 18:35 in Northern Ireland, it became the case that both transmissions were the same episode.

Just a thought as well about advertising. There used to be Mondays Newcomers, which showed new adverts that the ITV companies could record, and there was also, in the 1970s, a sequence where schools programmes were suspended between 10:30 and 11:00 each morning, to allow the ITV network to be used to distribute last minute adverts to all the contractors. Could that half hour gap have been used, if the capacity existed, to distribute entire programmes to contractors to show at a later date?

And when did the half hour break end, year wise, and why?

You couldn't splice 1" because it used helical tracks, it was only 2" Quad (a much earlier format) that allowed for physical editing.

You could have EdiTeced it - by laying clocks onto the tape first and putting them into record using insert (i.e. editing the recording onto the end of the clock) but there was no real need to do this as you were timecode syncing the two VTRs and running them in sync rather than cross rolling from one to another. You wouldn't be offering the VTR outputs to network, you'd be running in your own area offering a single, switched output to Network. They would never have seen the clocks if you did have them. If you needed a PasB of the final show as a continuous recording, you could book a fourth VTR to record the incoming feed (or record on site if an OB rather than a multilateral feed from an international event)