L!ve TV satellite channel

[Arthur Pringle]

Found an article about the channel I mentioned, it appeared in 2002 & was called Vibe TV, it was on for 4 and a half hours a day-  www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2002/jul/20/artsfeatures.features

Also remember seeing a channel that showed minor league cricket matches with very primitive filming.

There was the odd film channel, Movies4Men being the one remember, that showed films in appalling picture quality. They seem to have disappeared.

[Nightfly]

Jul 19, 2021 19:21:31 GMT Arthur Pringle said:

There was the odd film channel, Movies4Men being the one remember, that showed films in appalling picture quality. They seem to have disappeared.

Great article on Vibe TV. If the channel hadn't died on its own then Colin Paterson's article would have done the trick.LOL

I think Movies4Men came from Ireland and evolved from The Wrestling Channel. I presumed they decided to supplement the wrestling coverage with a handful of films.
I think they had the rights to a lot of 70s/80s ITV wrestling coverage and would show it unedited, old ladies giving V signs to Kendo Nagasaki  etc. which I certainly don't remember from the original Saturday afternoon coverage. There was one strange match which began with Kent Walton giving a level for sound and talking about reserving a gin and tonic at the bar for the interval before a long pause and then into "Good afternoon, grapple fans..."  

I also remember a short lived channel called Information TV which had some self help programmes in between a jolly chubby North East watercolour artist called Keith Fenwick. Curiously the channel was owned by folk singer/comic Richard Digance who would occasionally appear with Keith for his paint-alongs.

[Dirty Epic]

It's interesting how many Cable/Freeview channels like these have come and gone over the last few years.

I reckon we've lost 50-100 channels of this type since the late '90's. A lot of them deserved to go but a few did have a purpose. That 'Wrestling Channel' would've been interesting to see some of the old bouts on perhaps a idea like 'The Big Match' repeats for ITV4?

[Sparky]

Jul 20, 2021 10:56:42 GMT Dirty Epic said:

It's interesting how many Cable/Freeview channels like these have come and gone over the last few years.

I reckon we've lost 50-100 channels of this type since the late '90's. A lot of them deserved to go but a few did have a purpose. That 'Wrestling Channel' would've been interesting to see some of the old bouts on perhaps a idea like 'The Big Match' repeats for ITV4?

FTN (a Freeview Channel a few years back) did repeat the ITV Wrestling, the programmes they made after World of Sport was axed.

They were originally broadcast on a Saturday Lunchtime.

However- they could make up programmes using footage of bouts featured in World of Sport - though the argument would be "Who'd watch that?"

I've seen a few of the "Big Match Revisited" repeats on ITV4 - I just find the TV coverage of the time interesting - considering they didn't have Steadycams / Gimbles / Drones / Balloons and all that malarky they use today.

Also it's refreshing to see a football match that features football - no stops for VAR - and a time where sponsors and corporate tat didn't rule the roost.

[Sparky]

Still off topic...

The digital channel FTN also ran repeats of the "Krypton Factor" when the station opened on a Sunday evening.

There was one episode I remember where some contestant completed the assault course with a broken leg or angle.

Back to Topic...

What happened to Live TV? Did they just go out of favour? Merge up and re-brand? or close down altogether?

[Cartman]

I've an idea that it was turned into one of those Babestation type things. Another, vaguely similar one at about the same time was Men and Motors, which was very nearly as bad. That was some sort of subsidiary of Granada.

[Arthur Pringle]

I pestered my mum & dad for a satellite dish as I'd enviously seen the UK Gold listings in the paper for old tv shows, vintage Doctor Who being a big draw for me years ago. My dad agreed on condition that the dish didn't go on the front of the house. A man came round to install it & told us that it had to go on the front of the house to receive the signal, I was absolutely gutted.

We moved house & some bloke my dad knew installed a rusty secondhand dish & a used Amstrad receiver. Of course the reception was crap, the picture had permanent feint lines on it. Looking back it's ridiculous that we were paying a Sky subscription for it.

Whenever my brother came over he'd put The Adult Channel 10 minute freeview on which included 'Dish Of The Day' which was a model doing a striptease. I remember watching this with my mum & dad present After the 10 min freeview the picture would go fuzzy but you could still hear the sound. Sad to think it was 30 years ago.

My sister was once on Men & Motors, she was in the audience on a show hosted by Jenny Powell.

[Sparky]

Jul 20, 2021 20:29:45 GMT Cartman said:

I've an idea that it was turned into one of those Babestation type things. Another, vaguely similar one at about the same time was Men and Motors, which was very nearly as bad. That was some sort of subsidiary of Granada.

Yeah- "Granada Media Group" - at the time there was the two big fish in ITV- Carlton (enough said elsewhere about them) and Granada - both were empire building so each brought up a number of the smaller fish ITV companies and merged them together.

Granada had Yorkshire, Anglia, LWT, Tyne-Tees, (I think) Border and ITN. Carlton had Central, Westcountry, HTV/HTV Wales, Meridian and London News Network.

Channel TV, Ulster (UTV), Scottish Television (STV) and Grampian kept well out of it. (The latter is now part of STV)

We were then left with two huge companies - Granada and Carlton - they both branched into the world of Digital/Cable TV.

Carlton had channels such as Carlton Select, Carlton Food and fingers in pies with a number of those shopping channels - which they operated from the East Midlands TV Centre in Nottingham.

Granada had Men & Motors, Granada Plus and the various ITN News channels.

After all that went to pot, Carlton and Granada went cap in hand to the Culture Secretary asking if they could both merge and form one huge company.... and along came ITV1.

[Sparky]

Jul 20, 2021 22:43:43 GMT Arthur Pringle said:

I pestered my mum & dad for a satellite dish as I'd enviously seen the UK Gold listings in the paper for old tv shows, vintage Doctor Who being a big draw for me years ago. My dad agreed on condition that the dish didn't go on the front of the house. A man came round to install it & told us that it had to go on the front of the house to receive the signal, I was absolutely gutted.

We moved house & some bloke my dad knew installed a rusty secondhand dish & a used Amstrad receiver. Of course the reception was crap, the picture had permanent feint lines on it. Looking back it's ridiculous that we were paying a Sky subscription for it.

Whenever my brother came over he'd put The Adult Channel 10 minute freeview on which included 'Dish Of The Day' which was a model doing a striptease. I remember watching this with my mum & dad present After the 10 min freeview the picture would go fuzzy but you could still hear the sound. Sad to think it was 30 years ago.

My sister was once on Men & Motors, she was in the audience on a show hosted by Jenny Powell.

When the Cable TV infrastructure was rolled out in the UK (flippin heck I sound like a politician) - it was Nynex - who later became Cable & Wireless - who supplied the equipment.

My sole reason for getting cable TV was purely for UK Gold - one of the first things I saw on there was the showing of "Regan" - shortly before they began the (edited) repeats of the "Sweeney".

Other channels started appearing - there was one that ran (very old) episodes of Emmerdale Farm and Coronation Street back to back. Now and again, something 1/2 decent would be shown.

Juliet Bravo might have been on there.

UK Gold at the time were showing back to back Give Us a Clue plus old episodes of The Bill during the afternoon.

If I recall there was Eurosport, Parliament Channel, one called Landscape, Travel Channel, Weather Channel, SelecTV and Bravo that showed the repeats of the Avengers, and Worzel Gummage Down Under.

A little later on UK Horizons, UK Arena and all that appeared.

[Dirty Epic]

I was like you Sparky, I badgered my Dad to get Cable for UK Gold/Sweeney although quality wise wasn't as good as the free to air signal we got for the main channel's sure Telewest as was bodged the installation.

With Cable in it's early days did anyone get a white line at the side of the screen at all?

I remember seeing Villain possibly for the first time on Bravo too and not 100% but reckon they ran a lot of ITC 'cult' stuff in it's early days before it got taken over by Telewest/ntl/Virgin and became a 'reality TV' channel in the early to mid '00's.

SelecTV had some half decent stuff on it like One Summer and Scully and think they had rights to a lot of Yorkshire TV stuff too until it disappeared around '98-ish.

UK Gold in it's original form was brilliant and not just for things like The Sweeney, Out, Spender, Boys from the Blackstuff, House of Cards, Special Branch, Edge of Darkness etc. all got shown in it's mid '90's period until the UKTV rebrand which saw it become the 'comedy' channel it is today. Sadly there's not much on UKTV I'd bother with these days... not sure why Gold and W are premium channels either?