What was your favorite regional ITV station growing up?

Indeed, and it continued well into the 80’s. As time went by as more and more comms were sourced from VTR as well as telecine you’d often end up with commercial breaks where some of the comms had an optical between them and some not!

With reference to your earlier post about Southern’s optical, in the early days of colour there was an additional optical between the ads (a small sized picture of the Southern star would close up in the middle but not zoom out towards the viewer IIRC). But these cost money and every time you used one it reduced the overall life expectancy of the optical (physical frames lopped off when splicing etc). In the end the practice was dropped, unsurprisingly I was told this was on cost grounds and so ‘black’ between the comms was reintroduced.

No 2” VTR cart based machine could work quickly enough to play out a series of comms with an optical between each one. Come the advent of multi-decked machines such as the Betacart, Sony LMS etc It became possible again so at that point the choice became limited only by station policy if you like.

I don't think even the 90s tape based cart systems, had the processing ability to insert in opticals/break flashes. I recall late 90s a request from a European broadcaster to have flashes, and it wasn't possible (I can't remember the detail though)

I think you could give it a good go on a 4 deck Betacart, but by that stage I don’t think anyone in control of ‘policy’ was bothered. Of course there would be some inevitable limitations but nothing like on a 2” based machine.

Indeed it was, however I believe it was only the Southern regions which had this break flash, all regions controlled from Leeds only had a breakbumper at the start of the break. I’m not sure when the break flash stopped in the ITV1 era, it was certainly there in 2003.

Granada didn’t get a break bumper until Autumn 1996, which is quite late in comparison to other regions.

I don't remember ATV using them in their later years, and I am fairly sure Central never used them.
Amazing that Granada would have stuck with them until 1996.

I recall that the reason given for the Leeds playout centre not implementing opticals between adverts in the early 2000s, was that the (90s) cart installation wasn't capable of doing it... in the end they just went with commercials running into each other which has become standard practice across all channels.

You've misread the post you was replying to.

Ah, I did misread that.
Even more surprising that they introduced them then!

Coincidentally, Yorkshire and Tyne Tees (C3NE) also reintroduced break bumpers in around November of 1996; YTV having dropped them a few months after bringing them in in September 1989,and TTTV ending their own independent broadcast of commercial breaks at the end of 1992 (YTV not running bumpers at this time so they were effectively dropped).

Didn't HTV bring them in around this time as well?

HTV introduced break bumpers in September 1995 I believe.

This one in particular:

Surely if it was wanted in front of every advert you don't need the cart machine to play it out every time, you can just edit it onto the front of the ad?


The short period I worked with ads we insert edited them onto the longer tapes for the cart (which used an odd format, you couldn't just put the beta from the ad company into it) and often had to edit a bit of black at start to give the black gap.

Putting the bumper on is a bit of extra work anf of course not much good if you're doing ads for multiple channels. A real hassle if you rebrand too

Anyone else remember that odd campaign online years ago about the removal of the black gaps between ads? No trace of it now and we all survived and got used to it. I'm sure that part of their argument was that the broadcasters were trying to save money by not needing a machine to put the black between the ads