The 1980 ITV franchise auction

Nice piece from Transdiffusion on the abandoned Central logo used during the bidding process

https://www.transdiffusion.org/2010/10/04/central_pre_lau

The contract had already been secured by the time that logo appeared - the Central brand itself only came about because IBA stipulated that a rebrand would be necessary (amongst other things). During the bidding process a modified double eye ("for the dual region", apparently) was used, alongside the brand 'ATV Midlands':

Somehow that ATV Midlands logo looks a hell of a lot more scary even though its near enough the same ATV logo in different colours.

And from the 1968 round LWT bid as 'London Television Consortium' or 'LTC'. In fact their first choice of a name was 'Thames Television' but the other new company got there before them.


Yorkshire bid as 'Telefusion Yorkshire' but changed it's name after it was forced to merge with another applicant 'Yorkshire Independent Televison'

And of course back in 1955 ATV bid and went on air as ABC

Apparently this is was following complaints by Sky News who didn't want their breakfast programme's name pinched.

Going back to the "Network South" proposal. Would the transmitter technology of the time allowed such multiple optouts?

It wouldn't have been the technology that would have allowed it but where they are and how they were fed. The first would have been a bigger issue, the latter is changeable.

I've no idea of what their plans were but look at how well Westcountry managed 4 sub regions a decade later

Where there not all operated off by four sub relays? How many sub relays were there in TVS area?

Looking at the situation today from the Ofcom transmitter group map, the main Meridian transmitters are :

Hannington
Rowridge
Midhurst
Whitehawk Hill
Heathfield
Dover
Bluebell Hill (which was switched from Thames/LWT to TVS when TVS replaced Southern ISTR)

All of these transmitters have multiple relays/fill-ins at differing power levels.

TVS/Meridian have Whitehawk Hill (Brighton) as a advertising sub-relay (South news/South East ads). Heathfield, Dover and Bluebell Hill were South East and Hannington is Thames Valley (Beckley joined much later). Rowridge is South.

I think there was also or still is split advertising regions between Heathfield and Dover/Bluebell Hill.

ISTR there was some discussion about Whitehawk Hill having a sub-regional news service at one point - given that Brighton is an important part of the patch? I think it was a TVS plan for post-1992? Or was it Meridian? I have some dim memory that it might even have been trialled?

I lived in Hastings from 1991-1996 and I'm sure Brighton news was on both editions. I also lived in Brighton briefly where everything at home came from Whitehawk Hill, but go to a shop and there were shops showing both editions of the BBC and TVS local news!