TVS Television

[Arran]

TVS Television was before my time and not broadcast where I live, so all my experiences of it come from video clips on YouTube and TV Ark and details of programmes that it produced. From those I have seen it looks like it was a slick and snazzy TV company with an upmarket attitude focused on a better educated middle class audience. I also get the impression that TVS considered itself a TV channel in its own right rather than part of ITV. It was one of the few ITV companies that refused to use the generic ITV ident in 1989.

Has anybody experienced watching TVS in the years when it was broadcast?

[Richard1978]

Re: TVS Television

I remember the multi coloured logo before the likes of Number 73.

The only time I had the chance to see them actually present TV was on a holiday in 1987 on the south coast.

[Twocky61]

Re: TVS Television

I remember TVS which lost it's franchise to Meridian December in 1992

If I remember correctly TVS was originally Southern TV

[Richard1978]

Re: TVS Television

Southern TV was the original franchise holder for the South of England, but were outbid by TVS, who bought their studios & kept on most of the staff & programming.

[wispa lover]

Re: TVS Television

Might want to shed some light on this but I think most of TVS's programming are owned by Disney. That could be why Challenge are only showing Carlton era episodes of Catchphrase and not the original TVS episodes.

[Arran]

Re: TVS Television

Southern Television was not outbid by TVS because there was no bidding in that franchise auction. The IBA decided not to renew the franchise for Southern Television because of their ownership situation, and instead award the franchise to TVS. Southern Television was owned by a company based outside of the region that also owned newspapers. See TVS Birth of a Station for more information about how TVS was formed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDhSWbj_puM

Disney owns large parts of the TVS archive but the paperwork containing details of the copyrights associated with programmes has been lost which explains why very few TVS programmes have been broadcast or released on DVD since January 1993 when the TVS franchise ended.

[Richard1978]

Re: TVS Television

OK I wasn't sure how the franchises worked.

I'd heard the TVS back catalogue was tied up in a legal knot.

[Arran]

Re: TVS Television

The legal knot is the lost paperwork.

There are concerns over potential deterioration of the videotapes in storage. The TVS archive at the Maidstone Studios is mostly on 1" reel to reel tapes and Betacam SP cassettes that are both analogue formats with the newest items over 20 years old. I strongly support making a digital backup of the entire archive to guarantee that programmes will be preserved for all times whilst the complications with copyright are sorted out. It is unclear whether the master tapes of C.A.T.S. Eyes are in the TVS archive. There have been theories that they were moved to the other side of the Atlantic some time in the 1990s and may have since been destroyed due to the missing paperwork detailing copyrights.

[havasack]

Re: TVS Television

All of the regional channels saw themselves as independent channels rather than part of a greater ITV. Can't really say if it's output was aimed a a better educated middle class audience.

[Arran]

Re: TVS Television

Not strictly true. Discussions with people from inside ITV have revealed that TVS departed from the ITV tradition of popular entertainment and produced documentary programmes of comparable quality to those shown on BBC2. Some of them were shown on C4 rather than ITV. When TVS started out it had several former BBC employees on board.

In the 1980s the big five ITV companies were Thames, LWT, Central, Granada, and Yorkshire. They considered themselves to be at the heart of ITV and held an iron grip on the prime time schedule. Medium sized ITV companies like Anglia, Scottish, and HTV also saw themselves as ITV but in a more peripheral position as followers rather than leaders. It was the small ITV companies like Grampian, Ulster, and most notably of all, TSW that considered themselves as independent channels by producing large numbers of programmes for a local audience that were only shown in their franchise area and not networked. TSW even went as far as completely altering the schedule to suit itself and opting out of a number of networked programmes. TVS started off as a medium sized ITV company but managed to beat Yorkshire Television in terms of profit during the late 1980s. The IBA would not include them in the big five and kick out Yorkshire, or make it a big six. From that point onwards, TVS concluded that they were effectively an outsider rather than part of the core of ITV despite their size and profitability.

[Arran]

Re: TVS Television

There is a rumour circulating around the internet resulting from an email to Kaleidoscope in 2017 (that I have no details of and it doesn't appear to have been released to the public domain) that Disney has 'wiped' all the master videotapes of Motormouth back in 2010. I also read that the rest of the TVS archive has also been destroyed.

Something I do know for sure is that Disney is less than forthcoming when it comes to details of exactly which TVS programmes they had the videotapes for.

I'm tempted to say that the TVS archive was 'split up' following the sale of the Maidstone studios where the videotapes of the high value programmes that IFE wanted to taken by them and eventually ended up in the hands of Disney, and the videotapes of the stuff they didn't want was abandoned in the attic of the Maidstone Studios so effectively became the property of the Maidstone Studios and Disney has nothing to do with them.

[George 1978]

Re: TVS Television

I wonder who owns the shows that Bobby Davro did for TVS? He did some great shows in the latter half of the 1980s (even if most on here wouldn't agree with me). It was refreshing and modern at the time compared to that northern Mersey/Mancunian John Hamp stuff from Granada that almost felt a bit obscure for southern audiences.

I loved the Thomas the Tank Engine parody that was on YouTube relatively recently, and Rainbow got one as well.

I always assumed that comedians like Jim Davidson and Duncan Norvelle were huge inspirations on Davro - it's a travesty that he did straight acting after that.

[Jemima]

Re: TVS Television

I remember TVS, it was our local ITV station and I was quite sad when it was taken over by Meridian.

[George 1978]

Re: TVS Television

I remember TVS, it was our local ITV station and I was quite sad when it was taken over by Meridian.

It wasn't taken over by Meridian - it was replaced by Meridian.

[Jemima]

Re: TVS Television

Well all we knew is one night it stopped being TVS and became Meridian, weren't really interested in the finer details George.