Blammo

Category: Industrial Action

  • The Great Big Utterly Massive 1979 ITV Strike Datablast – Part 1

    The Great Big Utterly Massive 1979 ITV Strike Datablast – Part 1

    The 1979 ITV strike was the biggest and most notorious spell of industrial action that the network had ever seen (and would ever see). Over the course of this three part series of posts, I’ll be gathering as much information as I can about the strike, and trying my best to uncover the actual facts obscured by the over-familiar tales of the time.

    The blue screen of death…
    a timeline of events from initial trouble to complete shutdown

    The infamous blue caption which made up the majority of ITV's output from August to October 1979. In a computer generated teletext font are the words that were burned into the memories of an entire generation: "We are sorry that programmes have been interrupted. There is an industrial dispute. Transmissions will start again as soon as possible."

    May 1979

    • The unions begin their negotiations with the various ITV companies for pay during the forthcoming 1979-80 period. The ACTT – one of the main unions within ITV – ask for a 25 per cent pay increase, claiming that the profits of the ITV companies had been going up faster than staff earnings.
    • ITV offers a rise of around 9 per cent for all staff. The ACTT reject the offer.

    30th June 1979

    • The existing pay agreement for 1978-79 runs out. There has been no further development over ITV’s offer.

    17th July 1979

    • The ACTT votes in favour of major industrial action, with the option of a full-on strike.

    18th July 1979

    • EETPU, the electricians’ union, threaten a one-day strike to occur the following Monday. This is a major problem as these workers are responsible for actually ensuring the stations have electricity to broadcast with. When asked, Granada admit that they might not even be able to transmit so much as a caption from their studios apologising for the lack of service.
    • NATTKE, the union for scenery movers and prop handers (as well as switchboard operators), announce they are going work-to-rule from the same date. This would affect production on various pre-recorded shows such as dramas, comedies, and so on.

    Monday 23rd July 1979

    • The EETPU one-day strike goes ahead. ITV is completely off the air for the whole of Monday.

    Friday 27th July 1979

    • Negotations between the ITV companies and EETPU and NATTKE resume. ITV raises their offer to a 15% pay rise, plus 5% fringe benefits. EETPU and NATTKE recommend their members to accept the offer.
    • LWT only manage to transmit for about an hour (after taking over from Thames at 7pm as usual). They go off the air at 8pm, and remain off for the rest of the evening.

    Monday 30th July 1979

    • The ITV companies make an equivalent offer to the ACTT, after what was given to the EETPU and NATTKE.

    Friday 3rd August 1979

    • The memberships of the EETPU and NATTKE go against the recommendation to accept the offer, and choose to continue industrial action.

    Monday 6th August 1979

    • This is the point where everything really starts to go wrong: Southern Television are the first off air, going silent at around 6pm. (I have read somewhere on the internet that the announcer present at the time, Christopher Robbie, signed off in a slightly cryptic manner: “We’re going to leave you for a while now. Please don’t go away…” Annoyingly I haven’t been able to confirm that.)
    • Thames follow during News At Ten, at 10:07pm. Halfway through the first half of the bulletin, technicians simply turn the power off. When the management switches everything back on again, everyone walks out.
    • HTV don’t quite fall off the air, but are only allowed to finish News At Ten and the night’s programming via “restricted output” – in other words, workers allowed the management to continue operating the station themselves, but the engineers had withdrawn their labour.
    • Ulster Television possibly went off-air this night, but the contemporary reports are vague as to the actual day.

    Tuesday 7th August 1979

    • Southern’s workers give the station a brief respite, and they resume broadcasting at 7pm.
    • ITN’s news service is blacked out just before an edition of News At One, which was to be presented by Anna Ford. No further national news broadcasts would occur for the rest of the strike.
    • The ACTT ask the ITV companies to take their present pay dispute to arbitration. ITV refuses.
    • Workers at HTV decide to stage their own unauthorised local news bulletin, to be broadcast without management approval, presumably in place of News At 5:45. The bulletin was to be broadcast from tables set up in the HTV car park rather than the studios. Rather bizarrely considering everything that’s going on, ITN actually send a film crew to record the HTV staff’s rehearsals. HTV’s management respond to all this by phoning up the IBA in a panic and asking their own station to be disconnected from the transmitters. They promptly go silent.
    • Ulster is definitely off air after this date.

    Wednesday 8th August 1979

    • ATV’s local production of programmes stops completely, but service remains, albeit with the now-increasing disruption to the schedules also seen in other regions.

    Thursday 9th August 1979

    • Grampian go off the air.
    • The companies that can more or less be confirmed as still broadcasting to mainland UK by this point are Scottish Television, ATV, Southern, Westward, and Yorkshire. Granada are possibly still about, as well as Border.
    • The Association of Independent Television Companies – representing the ITV managment – make a final demand that unless the unions lift their overtime ban, all 15 regional companies will stop broadcasting by next Wednesday.

    Friday 10th August 1979

    • As a result of the aformentioned demand from the ITV management, the ACTT calls out all ITV members who had not already been suspended to go on strike for the next 24 hours. The strike is to begin at 6pm. Other unions don’t officially go on strike for another week or so, but this means that the attempts to keep ITV on the air are now effectively over, bar the shouting (between management and shop stewards in the transmission galleries).
    • As that fateful day’s service begins, the management of the remaining stations are still demanding transmission staff to take programming from what remains of the network. Everyone involved refuses to take any network feeds, or transmit anything to the other companies.
    • Yorkshire is supposed to broadcast a movie (“Operation Crossbow”, 1965) to both their own region and the network. The film doesn’t appear.
    • Someone at Anglia apparently decides to substitute one scheduled programme from ATV (most likely The Feathered Serpent, intended for 4:20pm) with a locally sourced copy of a different ATV programme – possibly an episode of the Leonard Rossiter sitcom The Losers. As with HTV, this prompts Anglia’s management to ask the IBA to disconnect the station from their transmitters.
    • ITV slowly falls completely off the air. An incredibly erratic service – if it can be called that – continues in some regions until the early evening. Going by descriptions of Scottish’s output (see Tony Currie’s memories below), the only things transmitted are entire ad breaks with no surrounding programming, interspersed with white-on-blue IBA captions and the occasional announcer popping up to apologise that no actual shows were going out. This absurd state of affairs continues until 6pm, at which point the strike is official and everyone’s out…
    • …Except for EETPU and NATTKE members, who will continue to show up for work for another week or so despite ITV having ground to a halt. Eventually they are locked out by the end of August.
    • Naturally, LWT fails to start up in London at 7pm. The weekend will have to start somewhere else for the next 11 weeks.
    • But in St. Helier, broadcasting continues with what is now the only ITV region – and it’ll remain that way until October. Shortly before everything goes kablooey, a van is dispatched to England to get as many film reels of random movies and ITC serials as they can bring back. This precious cargo is the main thing that will sustain Channel until late autumn.

    The above is hopefully as complete and accurate as possible – if any further info comes along, amendements will be made. This was put together with the help of various pages at Transdiffusion, archived pages from the Mausoleum Club forum on archive.org, and this wiki: https://wiki.scotlandonair.com/wiki/1979_ITV_strike

    IBA Engineering Announcements
    for absolutely anyone who’s still watching

    One interesting detail is that the IBA Engineering Announcements continued to be broadcast as normal, and were the only regular form of programming on the national network during the strike. (The IBA refused to get sucked into any of the unfolding chaos, not wanting to upset their fairly decent relationship with all the unions concerned.) Here’s an example of an edition from 1977, which is the oldest surviving one:

    On top of that, during the 7th September a unique network-wide test of various internal test patterns and cards were broadcast during daytime hours to make sure everything was still in working order, so that the viewers could eventually be Welcome Welcome Welcomed Home. The following is from a letter by Paul Gardiner of the IBA Engineering Information Service, which was written to someone who can only be identified online as, er, “pm5544”:

    The special test signals that you saw were originated in London and fed to the entire ITV network – the purpose was to check the correct operation of the network by measuring various technical parameters at different places including Post Office Network Switching Centres, and various transmitting stations. Various tests are regularly carried out over parts of the distribution network (these signals are not normally radiated by transmitters), but there was a unique opportunity to carry out tests throughout the entire network during normal working hours.

    The regular apology caption is said to have recieved regular audiences of up to 1 million – this is possibly down to the tapes of classical music that the IBA played out over the slide, as well as people leaving it on in the hope Crossroads would suddenly appear. Here’s Paul Gardiner again, from early September 1979.

    Two pieces of music were played until about a week ago [the end of August]: Beethoven Piano Concerto No 3, and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1. These have subsequently been replaced with a tape consisting of Brahms Symphony No 2 (Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra), Mahler Symphony No 4 (Israel Philharmonic Orchestra), and ‘New Year’s Day Concert in Vienna’ (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

    And in the Yorkshire region, the regular caption was replaced for a while with a police message asking the public for any information on the Yorkshire Ripper, who was still at large at the time.

    A continuity announcer’s lot is not always a happy one

    Here’s the an account of the Backroom Boys™ drama that unfolded that Friday in STV, from an announcer working at that station at the time – Tony Currie.

    On the day the strike spread to the whole country I was duty announcer at STV, and at 2pm we were due to transmit a feature film that was networked to us from Yorkshire TV. I was told to introduce the film, but not what to do if it failed to run. About ten minutes to go and the senior management of STV were in Master Control arguing loudly with the Transmission Controller and the ACTT Shop Steward. At one point the Director of Programmes and Transmission Controller were arguing about what I was supposed to say. Over talkback, I said “Gentlemen – you will know what I’ve said when you’ve heard me say it on air!”

    The film was ‘laced up’ in YTV’s telecine so we could see six in the gate on the preview monitor. (It took five seconds for a film to get up to speed so the film would be set up with the leader showing the number SIX. When it rolled the film leader would count down to 4 then go to black for the final couple of seconds before starting) I knew that if the film stayed on the SIX then we weren’t getting it, and the Union had ‘blacked’ any local substitute which meant we would have to go off the air.

    Ignoring the standoff in the control room (where it was very tense indeed) I introduced the film. Nothing happened. So I said “Well,I’m afraid that due to an industrial dispute we’re unable to bring you the film. it’s a lovely sunny day outside so I suggest you go and enjoy it now and we’ll be back with you at 5.15 for “Crossroads”!”

    We faded to black and everybody marched out. Black Hill [the main IBA transmitting facility for STV] took control and put out the apology caption and music. Later the crew came back to go through the whole pantomime again. Black Hill switched back to Cowcaddens [the STV studios] for a commercial break, my colleague Pauline Muirhead introduced “Crossroads” (which of course failed to run) and then we let Black Hill show the caption for half an hour. Then back to STV for another commercial break and Pauline apologised for the absence of “News at 5.45” and we were off the air for 12 weeks.

    (Excerpted from this link: https://web.archive.org/web/20090813101652/http://www.tvforum.co.uk/forums/topic29807/page2)

    NEXT TIME: The press reacts, Jersey goes into overdrive, and a famous movie star makes a surprise appearance.