A 1988 sign-off from KHON in Hawaii, featuring America the Beautiful sung in Hawaiian and technical information with a comprehensive list of translators and relays used to get the station’s signal across the islands:
A complete 1998 newscast from another Hawaii station, KGMB:
An animated 1976 HBO sign-off:
The 1982 launch of the Weather Channel:
Granada’s popular continuity announcer Colin Weston presents a regional news bulletin in September 1990. Weston was known for his charisma and his improvisation skills at announcing, but when it comes to newsreading, he did a very serious job. He retired from Granadaland in 1998 after a 30-year career.
At the end of the 1990s, Granada adopted a peculiar look for its news programs, based on the branding used by Hearst-Argyle stations in the US. This is a snippet of the last Granada Tonight from 28 September 2001 (the last with this identity): the following Monday (1 October), the bulletin returned to its classic name of Granada Reports.
Here’s the H-A version (from WCVB Boston, the first station who introduced this package in late 1995):
Certainly odd by a UK standard (and definitely toned down from the H-A look), although I could see what they were doing if they saw it on WCVB and saw the similar motif their “arrow 5” had in part to Granada’s logo, if you tilt the latter in the same direction like they did (and it certainly doesn’t hurt that it means it points towards the north-west!.. which I think they did at times with other local-oriented programs over the years up to then)…
This is how the Weather Channel provided local weather inserts right from the start:
Highlights of the early morning edition of 24 Horas from the public commercial channel Television Nacional de Chile (TVN) in May 1998. Includes news headlines, review of the papers’ front pages and the weather forecast.
CBS Nightwatch 1st anniversary of the program being on air. It included a cross to Nightline host at the time Ted Koppel as well Bill Schechner and Linda Ellerbee from NBC overnight which was cancelled later that year. One of the only times that people from three networks would of cross over in such a manner I guess.
From 20 years ago this week: a portion of RTP1’s Telejornal (the channel’s main evening news program) presented by José Alberto Carvalho. The topics reported on this segment: anti-war demonstrations around the world and a discussion about the efficiency of emergency services in Portugal.
Here’s a portion of the first broadcast; go to 7:03 for greetings from other morning shows around the world, including Ten’s Good Morning Australia:
Can’t believe Britain didn’t have a regular morning news programme until 1983. Surely there were experiential shows/formats throughout the 60s and 70s.
British broadcasting was so over-regulated, there was probably some law that forbade any broadcasting before a certain time of the day.
This is the same country that dictated that one magazine could only list BBC programs and the other could only list ITV. But then newspapers seemed to always be able to list both.
And IIRC commercial radio wasn’t allowed until the 1970s
I world assume NZ broadcasting also followed a similar path.
Yup. Thank goodness for stations such as Radio Luxembourg back in the 1960’s which provided a decent alternative. And of course all the pirate stations off shore.
Meanwhile over in Ireland, people in coastal areas installed deflectors so they could watch TV from Wales as the offerings from RTE were, at best, boring.
I don’t think NZ had any morning TV of any kind until the late 1980’s and they didn’t have a Breakfast TV show until the late 1990’s.
On the radio front, the NZBC controlled all radio with the national non commercial stations and the commercial stations in the main centres. Radio Hauraki the offshore pirate was largely responsible for getting privately run radio running in NZ
Radio Caroline still operating in one form or another.
Not on a permanent basis, but there were short-term experiments but not until the mid/late 70s… Yorkshire Television’s Good Morning Calendar [Calendar being Yorkshire’s local news name, even now] was on air for two months in 1977, and part of one episode of that is on YouTube - featuring Bob Warman, in what must’ve been a rare stint away from ATV/Central.
That led to some other experiments (both from Yorkshire’s then-sister station in Tyne Tees, and others in the network, details I’m not certain about) - and that eventually led to the IBA’s decision to award a 6.00-9.25am licence for ITV.
That of course, became TV-am, and they held the licence starting 1982 - but it took them more than a year to get on air and were beaten to the punch by Breakfast Time by two weeks, roughly.
Technically, that breakfast franchise still exists even though with ITV plc owning everything except in the STV regions of Scotland, it’s completely transparent - they now even put on Lorraine Kelly’s morning show (once a part of GMTV, the 90s/2000s breakfast franchise) across the “switch” time as a 9-10am timeslot, and only those watching in most of Scotland would know any better, as ITV1 promos become local STV promos 25 minutes in. 
Technically the breakfast licence also applies to the “channel 3” multi-channels too, but everyone involved saw no point in having any difference in that… and the idea of a “GMTV 2” eventually shifted to just be run on the CITV kids’ channel. (A later “STV2” was unrelated to this, running on city-level restricted licences briefly.)
Funnily enough though, once ITV got breakfast television, it didn’t take them long for regions to try going 24-hours, maybe half a decade… although “night-time” TV is its own story.
I’m sure someone’s told me before but I forget, but what was with the 9.25am changeover? Not even on the half hour?
I don’t quite understand the franchise model that they have there, but now that ITV owns all the franchises, I guess there is no possibility of them being re-allocated to new operators anymore?
Probably technically-related back then - when it started forty years ago, it was even a manual switchover by (I take it) British Telecom staff, so TV-am had to finish at 9.15am… when that was more automated, they could go right up to 9.25.
9.25 originally allowed the regions to do their own startup, then the programs actually started at 9.30. (But once 24-hour TV started and no-one cared about closedowns, programs instead started at 9.25.)
Edit: also forgot that ITV having schools programs in the mid-morning during most of that time probably also meant needing some of that time to show a countdown to the first show for those watching in/being taped for the classroom too, as was the thing for schools shows on both BBC and ITV. The latter was moved over to Channel 4 before the end of the 80s…
The “Channel 3” licensing system (as it started being generically called) now still has the relics of the regional system - but the last time the regions changed hands was in 1992/new year 1993 - a time when the only options were four channels terrestrially (Channel 5 didn’t exist yet) and five channels or so on Sky (they didn’t initially expand to fifteen or so until later in 1993).
Now that there’s so much other competition, it’s extremely unlikely they’d lose it - the current licences ITV and STV have expire at the end of 2024, and it should just get renewed for another 10 years - however, occasionally they do get used to ensure their public service broadcasting remit gets held up, such as minimum local news content. If they somehow failed a “fit and proper person” test, they could certainly ensure that those concerns would be rectified.
Ofcom puts out an opinion about their relicensing (also covering Channel 5), which they did in the middle of last year; the government has the final say.