☆ Central starts the day | Tuesday 2 February 1982

From the www.transdiffus... archives…
Yes, it's yet another Central startup! But this one is a great one: the blue IBA caption; the poor transmission controller getting buttons confused and muffing the start of the sequence; an announcement for teachers; and finally a Central Presents... caption into an ATV schools programme, Alive and Kicking.

[@LeonardStarbuck-pw6wm]

This is my region I can remember ATV becoming Central on the 1st of January 1982 it was a refreshed new start for our region!!!!!!

[@antster1983]

You've gotta admit - that theme by Jim Stokoe and Pete Bennett is awesome.

[@robmortimer4150]

Indeed. As are the schools tracks. Tennessee railroad and Spring to life 2 if I recall correctly.

[@11carbuff19572011]

Was used for a time as the title music for "The Central News Friday Show" then presented by Chris Tarrant with the late John Swallow contributing as always, the whole entire hour was full of so-called "And Finally..." articles. From 1983-85 incidentally, until Laurie Upshon dropped a right spanner in the works.

[@antster1983]

@@robmortimer4150 Yes. The two Martin Kershaw tracks used were specially composed, but later released on a Bruton album (BRC8 - Acoustic Guitars Volume 2). The clock tune is a 60 second edit of Steve Gray's "Spring to Life 2", also released on a Bruton album (1981's BRJ23 - Score and Underscore; and as you can probably guess, the underscore version was used on the interval tape and during the clock)

[@LeonardStarbuck-pw6wm]

Yeah it's great!!!!!!

[@sdaonline]

Superb as always! Central having problems picking an IBA card they all can decide on..

[@CaptainSiCo]

Please keep these uploads coming - it's great to see those schools slides and sequences! This is a Tuesday during the Spring Term of 1982, of course, and the subtitle 'Feelings' from Alive and Kicking should hopefully make it easy to date.

[@KEITHMU]

I always love the way that Central has three different versions of their logo and here they are all used in a space of 45 seconds. I presume the 'muffing the start ' comments relates to the ident before the IBA slide? Or have I missed something else? Great upload as always. Central had great and ambitious graphics, shame those days have gone :( PS: Are you doing Christmas Cards this year?

[@transdiffusion]

+KEITHMU It's the blue IBA card that's off - it should appear for the authority announcement and disappear when it's over. Instead it just hangs there. It should then fade to the Good Morning card, but there's a jump cut. It's a little thing, but it's clearly a bit of a muff. We're hoping to do Xmas cards again - we've got 200 individual unique designs this time! - but it depends on funding. At the moment, TBS is broke due to investing in new equipment. But if we can find some cash, then yes, yes we will!

[@CaptainSiCo]

+Transdiffusion Broadcasting System Something odd seems to happening with the sound which drops out for a couple of seconds at about 2:52 just as the schools slide appears. Is this how it appeared on the off-air recording or is it due to a glitch in the tape? It almost seems that the recording 'pauses' momentarily.

[@transdiffusion]

+CaptainSiCo It's on the tape, so it's not a KZbin or editing glitch, that much we can say. As to whether it's reflecting the transmission controller's bad day or the slow decline of the VHS tape itself after 30 years on a shelf... dunno.

[@robmortimer4150]

+Transdiffusion Broadcasting System given the rest of the clip doesn't seem to suffer any VHS style glitches, it does suggest maybe a switching error

[@aidanlunn7441]

The sound disappearing momentarily is definitely caused by something after the broadcast stage. It can't be a broadcast issue otherwise the hissing you hear would be constant - the hissing is either a symptom of this recording not being made on a HiFi sound VHS deck (which wouldn't exist until 1984), just a mono one or of poor analogue reception several years before NICAM digital sound was introduced. The hissing wouldn't be present on the signal as it left the IBA's transmitter(s), otherwise the IBA or Central would be straight on to fixing it. It's easy to forget with all the weaknesses of VHS and analogue TV that very good analogue reception and a well set-up TV could give very good results. People I speak to often think that analogue TV was constantly fuzzy and jittery. I think with the effort that they put in, technicians at the ITV companies, the IBA (and the BBC!) would disagree strongly. It's very likely to be a VHS tape issue (but it's not normal for the sound to disappear completely yet the video remains), assuming something really wrong happened with the tape's soundtrack and the VHS machine playing it back or the computer editing software in the transfer blocked it out by muting the audio. Several very recent-ish VHS decks had facilities to do this with the video signal, covering over any abject interference with a blue screen (somehow the designers of such machines thought a blue screen is preferable to fuzzy video when a videotape doesn't play back properly), so no reason why it can't be done with audio. Some video capture software does something similar as well when the lack of a stable signal is received from a VCR. So it's probably just a VHS tape glitch with the audio that the machine's built-in software or the PC video capture software is muting to cover up the interference.

[@robertcomer2767]

And to think exactly a year later TV-am starts the day with everybody switching off his utter dire content

[@jane1975]

@Robert Corner: We were avid watchers of Good Morning Britain and Roland Rat, speak for yourself.

[@barbaraannecortina7899]

How ironic is that? an ATV programme being repeated by its successor?

[@CaptainSiCo]

barbara anne cortina Happened a lot. Central and ATV were effectively the same broadcaster, with a new name. A lot of programmes produced in 1981 by ATV were re-badged live on air, with varying results!!

[@markjeffries3684]

Essentially, the IBA forced Lord Lew Grade to sell his share in ATV, after which he bought back the ATV name and the back programming library (Central kept the news archive, the schools programming and domestic programming that they were continuing, like "Crossroads," "Family Fortunes," "Bullseye" and "New Faces"). The IBA then required that the company change its name, sell the Elstree studios (which they did to the BBC in 1984 after the Nottingham facility was finished) and promise to a better job with news coverage than ATV (of which the split-region news bulletins were part of the promise).

[@jane1975]

@barbara anna cortina: Essentially they were the same company, in 1981 under their contract with the then IBA they had to rebrand or lose their franchise in the franchise round. They sold their Elstree studios in Hertfordshire to the BBC [ where Eastenders is filmed now ] and had a new studios built, in Nottingham serving the dual region of both West Midlands and East Midlands regions respectively. So a lot of their archived programmes were given the Central Presents badge for a while, until the company as Central produced some the programmes and then dropped the Presents logo and had their own ident there. I think this went on until mid 1983, they basically had to rebrand to sound more midlands based than be called Associated Television which is what ATV stood for originally and actually used to broadcast to both the Midlands and in London at the Weekends up until 1968 when a new franchise, London Weekend was created and started broadcasting from The South Bank.