[James2001]

I think the reason we ended up with a couple of years of really cheap ITV saturday morning shows was down to ITV paying a fortune for F1 rights, and they cut the Saturday morning budget to help pay for it. So Wow ended after only 4 months despite decent ratings, and we had 2 years of Scratchy & Co, Tricky and Mashed. It took until SM:TV for a bigger scale show to come back (and even then, most of the budget and focus was on CD:UK at first).

The shortened shows due to F1 really were a curse on ITV Saturday mornings in general! I particularly dislike the shortened Chart Shows that were missing the Dance/Indie/Rock charts and were rushed.

[lookoutwales]

The BBC's election night coverage from 1997 - the sell-thru VHS highlights edit (released a few weeks after the event, it seems)

www.youtube.com 

Think this was the only time a highlights tape was released - though later that year, HTV managed a similar trick by releasing an hour-long edit of their Welsh Assembly referendum night coverage (I need to get around to uploading it myself sometime)

[i.h]

perhaps not strictly pres related but an interesting video all the same - someone's got both halves of the BBC's sound in syncs system and has been playing around with it. he'd also love to get hold of the IBA SIS decoder and the documentation for the BBC/varian system.

www.youtube.com 

he also has a collection of philips test card generators and has other videos going into detail on those.

[lookoutwales]

A neat effort by The Real McCoy - produced at Pebble Mill, IIRC - at replicating TV-am's set and graphics to a tee.

'What Time You Call This, Britain?' wouldn't have been too out of place during the Piers era of GMB, either, but that's another thing entirely.

twitter.com 

[Neil Jones]

Not the Nine o'Clock News sent up what they thought Breakfast TV could have looked like, as at the time the IBA had announced they were going to create such a service, though Not The Nine didn't last long enough to see the service start:
www.youtube.com 

Some of the news skits made the compilation DVDs, though the significance was lost on why they were reading the news from somebody's kitchen and bathroom in the first place (and same for various other news skits presented out of context).

[Brekkie]

How we miss the sketch show - feels quite a long time since we had one now. Can only think of The Stand up Sketch Show and Emily Attack show which both mixed stand up with sketches.

[Spencer]

I always loved French and Saunders’ TV-am send-up…

youtu.be 

[James2001]

They did one on Ab Fab as well, complete with a joke about the franchise loss.

[Stooky Bill]

A very nicely put together compilation of 1970's European news programme titles. Ranging from the psychedelic French titles to the single bell tolling in Czechoslovakia


youtu.be