When I was a kid, my dad, Howard Thompson, who worked at Tyne Tees Television, would come home with wads and wads of old routine sheets which we then went on to use as scraps of paper.
Tyne Tees TV routine sheet from 19th February, 1971
What was the routine sheet? For the presentation telecine department, it was the detailed listing of that day’s items to be broadcast.
It involved the precise time of every programme, every commercial break, trailer and announcement set out in columns, with references to sources such as TC (transmission control), VT (video tape) and much more. It was the go-to reference for the transmission controllers and staff associated with live broadcast.
I must admit, I never actually wrapped my head round the machinations of where every piece of content came from and how it was exactly sent out into the ether. Lord, how patiently my old dad tried to explain the principles of broadcast!
But a very good explanation piece, emanating from ATV, then still in London, can be found here.
Back in 1957, it appears that all the ads, ‘spots’ as they were called, were collated onto to rolls of film and set up on a telecine machine.
At Tyne Tees, the nerve centre of the transmission control and telecine operation was located in the Control Room – a hallowed room with a bewildering array of screens, dials and switches.
By 1971, when these routine sheets were being used, the times were changing and a sophisticated means of ‘taking feeds’ of programming from other ITV sources like Yorkshire, ATV and London Weekend was in place. Later iterations of the Control Room would see new equipment installed, particularly involving professional-standard video-based machinery.
All this new technology worked smoothly for the most part but every now and again technical gremlins took the better of transmission control. Very rarely, there would be unaccounted gaps and yawning silences – all being fed live into people’s homes as they watched the telly.
The glitches were minimal – perhaps no more than a couple of seconds and barely noticeable to the casual TV viewer but if Dad was in the room when it occurred, he would start to gasp or mutter, vowing to find out how this piece of incompetence had just happened, presumably prompting inquest at the Studios the next day.
The worst of these interruptions came in the 1980s on a Christmas Day.
HM The Queen’s annual address to the nation is always broadcast at 3 o’clock precisely but on this occasion, for Tyne Tees views, nothing happened 15:00:00. It was more like 15:06:00. You might think a handful of seconds doesn’t matter, but this was the most important broadcast of the whole year, being broadcast in lockstep with the BBC. Cue my Dad’s mortification. I think Top Brass initiated an inquest. It turned it was a faulty of feed being supplied by Central TV or wherever. Heads might have rolled.
Anyway, from that day onwards, a ritual formed where, pudding being finished, he got up from the Christmas lunch table, got in his car and screeched up at the Studios in City Road where, at precisely 3pm, he would witness the smooth and orderly broadcast of Her Majesty’s message.
Getting back to the page lay-out of the routine sheet, these are from Friday 19th February 1971 and Wednesday 23rd February 1971.
They’re both from the last minutes of the day’s broadcast (meaning, for us kids, the bottom of the routine sheet day’s pile would be the top of our reverse-side scrap paper pile).
Such was the detail of all the timings, we can see that on Friday’s sheet, at four minutes past midnight: 00:04:49, a caption would appear on viewers’ screens.
Seven seconds later a run of eight commercials, lasting either 15 seconds or 30 seconds, would be broadcast. Tonight’s final messages came from Playtex ’18 hour’ girdle, Hamlet cigars, Heinz baked beans, Rennies indigestion tablets, Ryan’s Holidays, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, Alibi biscuits and Junior Disprin.
That’s quite a mix of products – no wonder it’s topped off with a headache tablet!
At 00:03:43, the concluding19 minutes 37 seconds of the cowboy film, The Hanging Tree are left, followed by 3 minutes of ads.
The final minutes of Wednesday's routine sheet (23rd February, 1971)
Wednesday evening’s broadcast schedules ends with an announcement at 00:19:28 followed, 15 seconds later, by a visual graphic of the clock and then at 00:19:53 the National Anthem. The night comes to a complete close at 00:20:28 by a blank screen, after which a 5 second long ‘courtesy announcement’ floats into the scene and by 00:21:03, it’s all over for the day – CLOSE DOWN.
In its day, there must have been a team of at least a dozen people, if not more, working to make all this happen.
Today, the process of sending material out for broadcast is called ‘Playout’ and all an individual needs is a decent laptop and some specialist software to do the job of the many.
That’s one of the reasons why the Tyne Tees TV of the 1970s employing a thousand in City Road, Newcastle today now consists of just a handful of people operating out of an industrial unit in Gateshead.
