The ITV regions

[sw2borshch]

Guisborough's Pam Royle retired from co-presenting Tyne Tees News on Friday teatime after 39 years in the biz and they had a bit of a montage retrospective of her career then some videoed farewell messages from some of the titans of the north of the region including Tim Healy, Denise Welch (not together) Sir John Hall (boo, hiss), Tony Blair (boo! Hiss!) looking like an awkward Mr Burns and live from New York ex-MLF Sting (BOOOOO! HIIIISSS!), real name Gordon Wasp, singing an acoustic version of Englishman in New York and joined by a very excited Shaggy. He, for reasons I cannot fathom, seemed to have been the one most genuinely pleased to be involved in the whole parochial business.

Amazing television.

https://youtu.be/h3S7TBgOR1M

From about 15:00 or so, then continues after the weather. From 27:02 is for the music lovers.

[Nefertiti2]

Anyone remember the monk who used to appear on Central at closedown?

[jwdd27]

A couple of YTV Calendar stalwarts, John Shires and Gaynor Barnes, also retired after 30 odd years last week - I'm guessing there's been a round of "restructuring" which has led some to "make the decision".

Video tributes from Joe Root, James Martin and Chris Kamara according to the report I read (no one actually watches these programmes do they?).

I lived opposite Yorkshire TV when I first moved to Leeds at the start of Gaynor's career, so I shared a local with her and her colleagues, although I was in there more than she was (and anyway the pub in question (The Queen) was less popular with the YTV crowd than the nearby Cardigan Arms.

[sw2borshch]

Chris Kamara should have been a Tyne Tees tributary.

[jwdd27]

Chris Kamara should have been a Tyne Tees tributary.

Yeah, a bit of an odd one, maybe someone else fell through and someone in the office was owed a favour by Kammy. They would have had dealings during Kamara's brief spells playing for Leeds and managing Bradford, but hardly a longstanding relationship, and Shires apparently supports Huddersfield anyway.

[Patrick Thistle]

https://twitter.com/JonnElledge/status/1378365159681490945?s=19

[Diable Rouge]

OTF with a political influence truly beyond its ken.

[Satchmo Distel]

I think it might have been a general commentary thing. I recently found a channel on YouTube that has got piles of pre-Match of the Day football on it. I watched some brief highlights of a match between Charlton and Everton last night and the commentator (I'm not sure who it is; Cliff Michelmore has been suggested in the comments - he was a freelance sports journalist at the time and it does sound like him, so I guess it could be) didn't seem to know the names of hardly any of the players' names apart from the Charlton goalkeeper Sam Bartram.

The YouTube account I think you're referring to has been drip-feeding the 1960s MOTDs through for about four years, now.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJF...kOKqaNQ/videos

Wiki:

The BBC meanwhile, started showing brief highlights of matches (with a maximum of five minutes) on its Saturday-night Sports Special programme from 10 September 1955, until its cancellation in 1963. The first games featured were both from Division One – Luton Town v Newcastle United and Charlton Athletic v Everton. Kenneth Wolstenholme and Cliff Michelmore were the commentators.^[6]

It might have been the first commentary Michelmore ever did, which would explain his lack of knowledge. The fact that this was a first might explain why the tape was not wiped.

[Guy Profumo]

I think it might have been a general commentary thing. I recently found a channel on YouTube that has got piles of pre-Match of the Day football on it. I watched some brief highlights of a match between Charlton and Everton last night and the commentator (I'm not sure who it is; Cliff Michelmore has been suggested in the comments - he was a freelance sports journalist at the time and it does sound like him, so I guess it could be) didn't seem to know the names of hardly any of the players' names apart from the Charlton goalkeeper Sam Bartram.

The YouTube account I think you're referring to has been drip-feeding the 1960s MOTDs through for about four years, now.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJF...kOKqaNQ/videos

Props for picking a match between Charlton Athletic (red / white) and Everton (blue / white) in monochrome though.

[My Name Is Ian]

It's amazing how little that stuff seemed to be picked up by TV companies. I was watching the Poland versus England match from Chorzow in 1973 the other night (the real match which did the bulk of the work in terms of knocking England out of the qualifiers), and England were playing in yellow shirts and blue shorts against a Poland team in white shirts and red shorts, all of which seems fair until you remember that a majority of people watching in both Poland and England will have been watching in black and white.

At kick-off, David Coleman says, "for those of you watching in black and white, England have ribands on their shorts". I hit the TV settings and turned the colour off, and that stripe on the side of the England shorts was the only way of telling them apart. I've long suspected that the "for those of you watching in black and white, Spurs are playing in all yellow" quote that is commonly attributed to John Motson as a Colemanball might have been a sly and deliberate criticism of clubs choosing yellow away kits when their first choice kits were also light coloured. There were still a lot of people who had B&W television sets by the early 1980s.

[Logan Mountstuart]

Wasn't that game played in Katowice? (pedants corner).

[ursus arctos]

The two cities are adjacent and the sources I can locate quickly agree on Chorzow

[tee rex]

In the popular perception it was Katowice, that was the place-name that stuck. Blame the BBC:

https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedule...don/1973-06-06

[ursus arctos]

Curious

It was at the Slaski (imagine diacriticals), which is definitely in Chorzow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_Stadium

My guess is that the Beeb was deceived by the name of the airport, which is Katowice (though it isn't actually located in either city)

[Sits]

Why weren’t England playing in red with white shorts? Because Poland were in white with red shorts?

[My Name Is Ian]

When I was writing the thing for it, I ummed and ahhed between Katowice and Chorzow to the extent that I even prepped a banner image of Katowice airport's big sign, but changed it at the last minute after consulting Google Maps. I am shockingly ignorant about Poland.

[Sporting]

I recently found a channel on YouTube that has got piles of pre-Match of the Day football on it.

It's fab.

https://www.youtube.com/user/theheavyroller/videos

[tee rex]

It's probably a forlorn task to un-name Katowice now. They may all be wrong, but the English media have kept it up for half a century. Bobby Moore's nightmare was so seared into the national consciousness that all subsequent games have been reported as a return to the scene of the crime:

Here's the Daily Mirror:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/footb...e-look-2373051

[Logan Mountstuart]

I bow to superior knowledge. I always remember being aged 10 and gazing at the whordes in the stadium, trying to imagine what life must be like for all those people. I'm fascinated by those big, old, communist bowls. Apparently, 133,000 watched a speedway tournament there in the same year.

And Lubanski and Deyna.

[ursus arctos]

Then


Now

[Levin]

Alan Partridge seems to be up on his ITV history, as demonstrated in tonight's This Time.

[My Name Is Ian]

I always thought that where they had Partridge doing local radio at 4 in the morning, had they made tat series thirty years earlier he would have been relegated to being an invision continuity announcer for Anglia TV.

[3 Colours Red]

This must be the most comprehensive collection I've ever seen. I bear no responsibilty for any nostalgia-gasms that may occur:

Two and a half hours very well spent if you ask me.

[My Name Is Ian]

I got so far through this other week and started to go cross-eyed, so I had to bail. It's still on my watch later, winking at me to go back to it.

[3 Colours Red]

I'll admit all the Carlton variations are hard work - trust the shittiest ITV franchise (and I use the F word most advisedly) to have the most idents with the least differences between them.