Historical details of Central and other ITV Companies

I was under the impression that 'clunk' disappeared because playout from that point went through the regions (so that they could add in their own news bulletins, as was the new arrangement with GMTV); hence why one of the regions (I think UTV) were able to interrupt GMTV on one occasion and got in to trouble for it, and also why things like that Anglia presenter doing her hair made it to air.

So there was no clunk at all in the GMTV era? I know I don't remember seeing any clunk in the Granada area.

That's my understanding, and a quick check of a handful of videos on YouTube confirms it.

This is strange since there are cluck etc going into the local news and there clips to prove that. I'm also know stv had them at 09.25... did this last all of the 90s no ideas.

Is that to do with that phenomena which TonyCurrie has explained really well somewhere else (might have been 'genlocking' but I can't be certain) which was known to cause the junction to ITN to distort slightly if it was not adequately prepared for?

I think if you look at InspectorSands post here you'll get a link to an insight to Genlocking.

http://www.tvforum.co.uk/tvhome/networked-itv-1990s-31327/page-2

In SD days, the gallery PA had an opt panel in front of her. When a news opt was about to take place she said "1 min to the news opt" into the gallery talkback which was relayed to the regions and pressed a "1 minute" button on the opt panel which put up an in vision cue dot. With 5 secs to go she pressed a -5 button on the same panel and the cue dot was removed and a switch cue pulse was sent to each region to initiate a changeover at the remote region to switch automatically from the incoming daybreak feed to the local news feed. So this switch was sent from hq in London and was under their control. It used to be transmitted as part of a closed teletext system not decodable by viewers. Talkback was also distributed via teletext by a system known as talkback in teletext or "tit" for short. I would imagine its still very similar nowadays. You're right about utv and I think it was one of the reasons why GMTV took the news provision contract away from them at the time. They obviously bypassed the GMTV remote switching kit.

Yes, and GMTV were furious. Not for lost ad revenue or because part of their programme could not be seen in NI, but because they'd been granted a reprieve by the ITC less than a month earlier who said their news output had reached acceptable standards. (Prior to this GMTV were in danger of having their licence shortened and a £2 million fine)

As soon as the UTV thing happened people started questioning GMTV's news standards once more.

For the record, it was more than enough work to do. All listings, previews, film reviews, supplementary material had to be generated by hand from paper copies from BDS (Broadcasting Data Services). It was labour intensive and there was no IMDB or internet to verify information, instead we relied on Halliwells and reference books to make sure we were correct.

Again, there was no spell-check in the native software we used and so everything we generated had to be proof-read a couple of times in order to make sure we didn't get into any legal trouble with the material we published.

So if a producer of "This Morning" got in touch with us at 10:20am wanting a recipe on air by 10:40am, it would be faxed over to us (remember that), the recipe would then be typed into the template (edited on the fly) and then proof read by a couple of us before it made the air. It was hard and fast work...

What happened to Intelfax? As far as I know, it got wound up after losing its main subtitling contract for C4.

Over and out,

Darren Lock
Ex-Intelfax and proud of it!

Thanks for that, I hadn't realised there was so much in the ITV text services, and assumed what there was was just provided by the broadcaster. Incidentally I did used to use them as the listings were far quicker to get to than the Teletext ones.

Many years ago I had a job interview at Intelfax, seemed a nice place, although as I messed up and arrived very late there was no chance of a tour... or getting the job!

Re. The 'clunk'. It's worth remembering that TV technology has changed a lot since the days of Thames and TVam. Then any crude switching would have been done with analogue signals. Doing the same with SDI or an ASI stream just doesn't look as messy even on the simplest of routers (especially when done in the black as the 9:25 one is).

Also in the digital days they wouldn't switch the feed directly into the transmitter, it's into professional kit that's encoding and multiplexing the channel with others. That will be able to handle and smooth out the disturbance

There was the potential for glitch at 09:25 during the GMTV era. GMTV's ads came out of LNN's playout
system, but they were based on Macro regions (similar to C4's) There was a custom gizmo box (actually two, one in the main path, the other standby) that reorganised accordingly the national circuits out of LNN at 06:00 and 09:25hs everyday (fired off by GPIs from the automation system).

I remember it well, because yours truly got the main and standby boxes round the wrong way one morning, while
removing one from the rack to modify it. I took This Morning off the air everywhere except London, I've never re-plugged 6 BNC connectors so quickly since !

The box switched SDI streams, fairly cleanly, (it did them during the VBI) but I did notice green line flashes from time to time on Meridian.