What was your favorite regional ITV station growing up?

Granada had Granada Community News for a while which went out at around lunchtime and then at 6:00pm, it later changed to Granada Action, but it ran well into the National ITV1 era. Whilst it was a good thing to see, it was still using the 1995 G stripe logo at that time.

UTV's CSAs appeared throughout daily junctions without a dedicated slot.

Twice, they were rebranded as "YouCare" - firstly, in 2000 before they ditched the 1993 logo; then again c. 2002 when they were sponsored by a local tea brand. CSAs continued on UTV until at least 2006.

Actually that's not strictly true. Tyne Tees dropped PSAs in January of 1993, and introduced "Community Link" as a replacement in April of the same year. The sting was intended to match TTT's 1992 branding -- for a while in 1992 they'd continued to use the PSA sting with the first few seconds containing the old TTTV logo removed.

YTV's announcements were branded "CSA" from around 1991 to 1998-ish, having had various variants of "Yorkshire Television serving the community" before then. YTV actually took TTT's "Community Link" branding in around 1998... TTT's Community Link had originally used a black and white colour scheme with TTTV logo from 1993, but when they rebranded as C3NE they changed this to the same sting but using blue and white to match the new branding, with the TTTV logo removed. YTV simply adopted this sting for their own announcements, this was then changed to a more flashy CGI sting some time later.

Here's YTV's CSA sting from 1995, demonstrating the point (ironically shown on Tyne Tees!):

Around this time, Tyne Tees would show YTV’s CSAs whenever the Eastern Cinema movie was on.

Watching the early episodes of The Bill on UKTV Play has had me wondering, why did Thames do that thing of having the copyright caption animate on letter by better in the late 80s/early 90s? I don't think any other company did it.

Don't suppose there was any reason other than Thames thought it looked quite nice, and hadn't been able to do it before, so they embraced it with gusto. As you say, it was done on all their shows.

It reminds me of the Radio Times feature for Election 92 where Peter Snow was talking about the graphics, and how some of them span around - "They spin around because we can make them spin around!"

Well, not all, a quick look on YouTube finds it wasn't on Rainbow or This Is Your Life (or at least not on any of the episodes I can find on there), and presumably some others, but it was clearly on the majority. Seemed to stop, on their ITV shows at least, after they went off air in 1993 and moved the copyright to the endcap. It was on Heroes Of Comedy that they made for Channel 4 up until they introduced the new Thames logo in 1997 though, and possibly other shows they made for C4.

Also looks like they started spelling out "copyright" rather than using the © symbol at the same time they started animating the copyright straps on.

Here's a Tyne Tees CSA from 1988, showing you the revised jingle. The original simply had the TTTV logo spin round to CSA, and two synthesizer notes played. The facility mentioned in the CSA no longer exists; the house no longer has the lettering on it, and is just back to being a normal house.

While we're talking about PSAs here's some very 80s ones (and very different to Tyne Tees') from The London Ccmmunity Unit about contraception and domestic violence:



I'm sure the LCU had an animated logo based on the classic LWT ident but I can't find that

That was actually the third version of TTT’s PSAs. The first one, introduced about 1982, had a longer animation and jingle with the TTT logo zooming in then rotating to show the PSA graphic. Not sure if any footage exists.

Is it this one?
https://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/presentation/itv/regional/tyne-tees/tttv-community-links/?clip=1507

This one here dates from 1985, same graphics, but simple jingle, and different form up.