Map Redrawn: The Local ITV Shows That Fell Through the Franchise Cracks

Regional telly is the part of British broadcasting that history keeps misplacing. Everyone can name a national sitcom that got axed. Almost nobody can name the teatime magazine their own region ran for twenty years, even though their mum was on it, twice.

Franchise rounds did the deleting. In 1968, in 1982 and again in 1991, the map of ITV was redrawn, companies disappeared overnight, and programmes that had been fixtures in one corner of the country simply stopped — often without a final episode, a repeat, or anyone keeping the tapes. This is a guide to that cultural amnesia, and to the stubborn few still digging through it.

Why the local stuff falls out of memory

National shows get repeats, DVD releases and retrospective documentaries. Regional shows get a mention in a newspaper the week they end and then nothing. They were made for a transmitter footprint, not a nation, and they were made cheaply — on film that was expensive to store, or videotape that was routinely wiped and reused because the stock cost more than the programme was thought to be worth.

There is also the snobbery problem. A regional news magazine with a bloke in a cable-knit jumper doing a piece about a donkey sanctuary does not look like heritage. It looks like filler. Which is exactly why it is disappearing.

1968: the year TWW disappeared

The 1967 franchise round took effect in 1968 and it was brutal. TWW, which had held Wales and the West, lost out to Harlech Television — HTV — and its output largely evaporated. Its archive is one of the great gaps of British television: tapes wiped and reused, film material disposed of, and only scraps left in private hands and in the memory of people who were there.

London changed too, with ABC losing its weekend slot to LWT and merging with Rediffusion to create Thames. ABC's shows had a habit of surviving because they were sold abroad and made on film. TWW's local output had no such safety net. If you want a single example of how thoroughly regional telly can be erased, start there.

1982: puppets, pranks and the great reshuffle

The 1980 round, taking effect on New Year's Day 1982, is the one people of a certain age actually remember. ATV became Central. Southern became TVS. Westward became TSW. And in the handover, a lot of beloved local programming was quietly not renewed.

Tiswas was one casualty of the Central relaunch, wound up in 1982 as the new company went after a tidier image. Pipkins, ATV's long-running pre-school puppet show, was already finished by 1981 and Central had no interest in reviving it. Most poignantly, Gus Honeybun — the rabbit puppet who had been wishing children happy birthdays on Westward since the early sixties — was carried across into TSW, survived another decade, and was then axed by Westcountry when it took over in 1993. A thirty-year regional institution, gone in an afternoon.

Kids' telly took the worst of it because it was the most regional thing of all. Puffin's Place on Channel Television, Glen Michael's Cartoon Cavalcade on STV, the birthday slots and the birthday cards read out by a man in a regional continuity booth — none of that travelled, and none of it was ever going to turn up on a national clip show.

1991: the auction and its casualties

The 1991 round was the one that felt like a business decision rather than a reshuffle, because it was. Thames lost its London weekday franchise to Carlton. TVS lost to Meridian. TSW lost to Westcountry. Years of local programming ended in a single document.

And the archive problem got worse. TVS's programme library was broken up and sold on in the years afterwards, and significant chunks of its regional output are still unaccounted for. Coast to Coast, its nightly news magazine, ended in 1992. The regional newsroom became, almost everywhere, a template: same set, same graphics, different town.

What survives, and who is digging

More than you would think, and less than you would like. The regional film archives are the unsung heroes here — the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan, the Yorkshire Film Archive in York, the North East Film Archive, the Wessex Film and Sound Archive in Winchester, the East Anglian Film Archive at UEA, the Screen and Sound Archive at the National Library of Wales, and Northern Ireland Screen's digital collection. Between them they hold local material that would otherwise be landfill.

Then there is the informal network. Kaleidoscope's treasure hunts have turned up regional material for years. Transdiffusion documents the companies themselves with genuine obsession. And YouTube is full of people's grandfathers, digitised from VHS with the tracking wobbling at the bottom of the screen — which is, for a show like ATV Today or About Anglia, frequently the only copy anyone has seen in decades.

Why the regions deserve the second look

Because they are the only bit of television that was actually about where you lived. A national show told you what Britain was. Calendar, Granada Reports, Heddiw, Scotland Today told you what your street was, who your councillor was, and what had flooded that week.

That is worth more than the archive system has ever admitted. If you have a loft with a VHS in it and a label that says something regional and slightly mysterious, please do not skip it. Somebody, somewhere, has been waiting forty years to see their mum on the telly.