Channel Television during the 1979 ITV Strike

Very true.
There is a story that Richard Baker who was the overnight shift on Radio 4 being kept awake by the clock in the bedroom at the Langham.
He found that shorting the wires out with a paperclip stopped it.
As he walked through BH the following morning to his horror he spotted all the clocks in the building had stopped at exactly the same time!
Sorry for going off thread here......

And they were shown during the strike.

There’s a serious lack of knowledge and understanding of the history of industrial relations in this country in this thread and how much the fabric of social history has changed in the past 40 years.

Although presumably that was in the era when The Langham was a BBC building and not a hotel?

If you can give enlighten us it would be gratefully received.

Well maybe if someone could explain it to us in a concise manner, it would be helpful, especially for those who did not live through the industrial turmoils of the 1970s and for some of us (including me) who come from a different perspective on broadcasting.


The reason questions are being asked about the strike, why it happened, why it lasted so long, why no emergency service provided (like 1968) etc, is because we no nothing about that era, as very little is written about unions in television during that era, and we have to rely on very little information.

Which was never mentioned in the schedules of course, ‘announcements’ and not a ‘programme’ ! 😎

No, they certainly wouldn’t have done, but it still gets forgotten that they and not the companies were the legal entity broadcaster

I have read that during the dispute, YTV transmitted appeals about the Yorkshire Ripper on behalf of West Yorkshire Police. I remember seeing these in the Tyne Tees area - they were just on screen captions and very similar to the normal “industrial dispute” caption, so I suspect these were transmitted from an IBA site. Because they were seen on Pontop Pike, perhaps they were transmitted nationwide, or at least further afield than just the YTV area.

Did each major transmitter originate a dispute caption, or were these generated centrally from one place?

The captions were generated by the IBA, they started off in the early days of the dispute as the ‘loss of sync’ derived automatic captions generated at the main TX sites, but soon the captions were nationalised, and music was added. I was always told the IBA gallery at Crawley Court generated the apologies etc, but Tony Currie posted it was at their South Wales control room at St Hilary. Whatever, they then later developed into Yorkshire Ripper notices for 15 mins every hour, they were national, we saw them down here

During the day, until they began broadcasting, I presume Channel showed TCF instead of the IBA captions? I was also just wondering, the day the strike ended, did Channel take the "ITV" branded clock and continuity produced by Thames that evening, or did they use their own continuity?

No idea about the second question, but none of the ITV companies broadcast TCF, that was the IBA’s job, and in the 70s TCF was derived from a slide scanner at the appropriate IBA colour control room ( typically situated at the primary IBA Tx site in each ITV region)