Tonight’s Anglia… in 1976 

28 June 2017 tbs.pm/12774

The TVTimes tells us what was on Anglia on Monday 28 June 1976. Things worth noting include:

• Although broadcasting hours had been deregulated by the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications in 1972, the ITV companies had not chosen to introduce breakfast or morning television to any significant extent. The industry felt that there was not enough advertising spend available to support such programming, especially as radio, including from 1973 the new Independent Local Radio (ILR) stations, had a natural monopoly at that time of the day.
• The advertising industry itself was in favour of ILR being given a fair wind in the morning peak so that the stations would be successful, more would open and advertising prices would fall. Only then should commercial television compete between 6am and noon.
• With only one network available and no sign of the fourth UHF channel being made available by the government any time soon, programmes for schools and colleges also required time from ITV, having already been moved from afternoons to mornings in 1972. There were few video recorders available – and certainly not at prices schools could afford – to allow schools programmes to be, say, broadcast over night.
• This schedule is from after the schools have risen for the summer, so the slot normally taken by education programmes for children is replaced with semi-educational programmes for a more general and largely adult audience. Content and priority varied from company to company.
• Whilst hours were now derestricted, the advert averages over the day were not. Showing advertless educational programmes at 10.30am allowed the companies to borrow against the time for selling more slots in peak.
• Coming on air in the mornings was not cost-free, of course – staff had to be paid whilst working and the transmitters consumed electricity. The bigger companies – Thames and Yorkshire here – come on earlier, perhaps more confident of selling the averaged time for a profit later. Anglia and Southern seem less confident, as does ATV for some reason.
• Alastair Burnett, former editor of The Economist and the Daily Express and the presenter of the two BBC general election broadcasts in 1974, slides into Leonard Parkin’s seat at First Report at 1pm. He would remain with ITN for the rest of his career.
• A choice of viewing for people in the overlap areas at 2pm: Houseparty from Southern on Anglia vs Good Afternoon from Thames on ATV, Thames and YTV. The choice of programme to take was up to the individual companies, with a note that Houseparty was available considerably cheaper than Good Afternoon.
• Children’s programmes begin at 4.25pm with The Romper Room, an American local format bought by Anglia, Border, Grampian and Ulster, who all made their own versions under the title. Granada’s Clapperboard is the alternative the overlaps go with.
• About Anglia at 6pm was an award-winning regional show, with a surprisingly large budget mostly used up by the transport costs of the long distances between population centres in the east and the use of film.
• Coronation Street at 7.30pm has a nice set of inverted commas around “shopped”, suggesting this slang was new or uncommon in most of the country.
• The British practice of not having a different word for series (as in a whole set of programmes) and series (as in a season of said programme) means that Get Some In from Thames at 8pm is labeled New Series meaning the first episode of the second series.
• World in Action at 8.30 is an edition entitled “Nuts and Bolts of the Economy – Somebody Has to Do It”, which is something of a mouthful.
• Sri Lankan actor Albert Moses appears in episode 4 (out of a total of 11) of Bill Brand, playing “Pakistani”. Different world.
• The late movie at 10.30pm is across the ITV network and is a doozie: Universal’s 1970 western Two Mules for Sister Sarah, presumably debuting on TV here.

External links

• See the rival BBC-1 London schedule at the Genome project.
• See the rival BBC-2 England schedule at the Genome project.