MY HEART WENT DOWN SOUTH [414]

Recent history can still turn to dust without anyone noticing, and if that history reflected your local area, that stings further.

Television South (TVS) provided ITV programmes for the south and south east of England from 1982 and 1992, back when Southampton, and TVS’s second base in Maidstone, was as major a producer of television shows as Bristol, Leeds, Birmingham or Newcastle, places reduced to outposts for regional news as ITV merged itself into a national company based primarily in London and Manchester. Travelling into Southampton took my family past the TVS (formerly Southern, later Meridian) studios, and it commanded my attention every time.

TVS sold its news output to Meridian when it took over the southern ITV franchise, but the rest of its programme library is currently missing, believed lost or destroyed, creating an eleven-year gap covering children’s programmes like “No. 73”, “Motormouth”, “How 2”, “Tugs” and “Mr Majeika”, dramas like “C.A.T.S. Eyes” and “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries”, game shows “Catch Phrase” and “All Clued Up”, comedy shows by Bobby Davro, “Summertime Special”, the sitcom “That’s Love”, international co-productions including the UK segments of “Fraggle Rock” and a 1987 film about Nelson Mandela starring Danny Glover, along with a large number of documentaries and local public affairs programmes that could have visited my local town.

This is, once again, a case of “lost media” meaning an archive is lost, and not just unavailable online. Many off-air recordings of TVS programmes have been put online by members of the public, but finding them is difficult, as searching the straightforwardly named “tvs” or “television south” is often counterproductive.

TVS is the only ITV company whose output is unavailable, with other former franchise holders having their programmes taken over by the companies succeeding them, or by local archives and businesses. However, the owner of the TVS library, wherever it is, has been The Walt Disney Company since 2001, after a long process of company takeovers that involved evangelical Christian preacher Pat Robertson and “Power Rangers” producer Saban Entertainment. This process appears to have shed the paperwork associated with the library, crucial to making the programmes available to view on home video or online, the last such incidence being the release of “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries” on VHS cassette in 2000. 

Later enquiries made by people to Disney about the location of the tapes themselves has led to the unsatisfactory conclusion that they are unavailable or lost. It is not likely that the tapes were “wiped” because the price of broadcast-quality cassettes had declined enough by the 1980s to avoid a practice of reusing them, and because the potential of revenue from home video necessitated retaining them, just as when Pat Robertson launched a UK version of The Family Channel using TVS repeats. 

It is not known if these tapes have been mislaid, or simply thrown away, and the perceived worth of the archive to The Walt Disney Company is also unknown – I cannot imagine they had much use for a daytime magazine show titled “Not for Women Only”, but someone may do, if only for research purposes.

This could be an argument for needing an audio-visual equivalent of the British Library – the British Film Institute has a vast archive, which includes some TVS programmes they have received over the years, but they do not act in that sort of capacity. When a programme’s worth cannot be foreseen, being unable to make that decision because it has already been lost is difficult to take – even if is a Bobby Davro sketch show so “of its time” that the cultural references make no sense, it would be useful to see why.

This situation required a campaign to find parts of a major international show made in my lifetime, “Fraggle Rock” – the UK wraparound segments filmed by TVS starred Fulton McKay and later John Gordon Sinclair as a lighthouse keeper. Only twelve episodes were known to exist in broadcast quality, later raised to twenty-nine after the search – the remaining sixty-five episodes exist as off-air recordings made by members of the public.

I only got rid of my VHS cassettes because I knew I did not own anything that didn’t otherwise exist. This cannot be confidently said for anyone owning a recording of a TVS programme.

DANCE YOUR CARES AWAY, WORRY’S FOR ANOTHER DAY [79]

The future of television once lived on my doorstep. In the pre-internet, pre-digital days of the 1980s, Television South (TVS), the local ITV company for the south and south east of England, based in Southampton, the next city along from me. They made programmes that were shown across the UK and the world, and owned two TV studios in the UK - with a third in Hollywood co-owned with CBS - and also owned MTM Enterprises, makers of “Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere,” and “Newhart.” Note the past tense – TVS had the kind of ambition that created its own obstacles to overcome, but before they tripped themselves up, they were captivating to watch.

Franchises to run ITV companies in the UK were once run like a beauty contest – with each review, your company could take over a licence if you could prove you could provide a better service. In 1980, a group of TV producers thought they had better ideas for programmes than the existing Southern Television, which had a track record in children’s programmes, opera and local news, but were otherwise safe and conservative, and owned by companies based elsewhere, in London and Scotland. TVS expected a “shotgun marriage” with Southern (as had happened to create Thames Television in London), but won an outright victory - Southern felt they did not need to provide enough detail on their re-application, until they were asked to do it again.

What could have been an independent company became a fully-fledged TV station, buying and building its own studios, selling ad space, and making deals. When there was no space at the same decision-making table as the major ITV companies – Thames, Yorkshire, Granada (north-west England, Central, and London Weekend Television (LWT) – TVS signed a deal with LWT to gain access to their space, putting game shows like “Catch Phrase” (from 1986, and still going) onto screens. Drama series like “C.A.T.S. Eyes” and “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries” were also shown, but they also had form with children’s programmes like “Number 73,” “Art Attack” and “How 2.”

TVS had some firsts – an episode of the 1982 science series “The Real World” became the first TV programme to be shown in 3D, using glasses given away with the “TV Times." TVS also owned the UK’s first TV news helicopter, and made the wraparound live-action scenes seen in the UK for The Jim Henson Company’s “Fraggle Rock,” using a converted cinema in Gillingham, Kent.

However, with so much money coming in from advertising – the south of England was more likely to watch the BBC, so TVS instead pioneered selling UK TV ad space based on the types of people watching - and fewer opportunities to make bigger programmes in the UK, TVS started to look around. We nearly had a situation where a Southampton-based TV company owned either the film division of Thorn EMI, or even the biggest TV station in France, TF1. Instead, MTM Enterprises and other American companies were bought, in anticipation of the revenue from selling programmes worldwide, and TVS became a conglomerate named TVS Entertainment. On screen, they were TVS Television – “Television South Television” – underlining that it was no longer just about the south.

This growth happened just after the “Black Monday” stock market crash of 1987, and ahead of the global recession of the early 1990s. Not making enough money from selling programmes as they had hoped, job losses followed, and the companies they bought were being sized up for sale again.

In 1991, it was the turn of TVS to defend its own ITV franchise. This time, instead of only relying on your track record, or future plans, the Government had introduced a blind bidding process. TVS won the programming round, but they bid £59 million – an amount they would have to pay each year. They won this round too, but they lost their franchise, their business plan having been judged to be unsustainable - they bid more than they could realistically pay. The company that won, Meridian, bid £36 million – now, with the internet and digital TV turning the system upside down, each ITV region pays a token £10,000 each per year.

What remains of TVS is hazy memories, and hazy video recordings posted to YouTube. TVS was bought by IFE, a company owned by the fundamentalist Christian preacher Pat Robertson, launching The Family Channel using the TVS library – this later became the game show channel Challenge, helped out by the repeat showings of “Catch Phrase.” As IFE was bought, TVS was passed through 20^th Century Fox, Saban International (the “Power Rangers” people), and its library is now owned by The Walt Disney Company. Reportedly, the paperwork for the programmes has been mislaid, meaning it is impossible to show them, meaning a whole period of UK TV history is out of reach, for now. The situation may change one day but, for now, I’ll keep with what I have.