TV AM Strike
#1

Watching a clip of TVAM from February 1988 which was during the strike. Interesting mix of output. There was a full half hour of Batman at 7:30am and then looks like Good Morning Britain started at 8am.

What is noticeable is the news bulletins are hosted in both London and Washington with Washington providing most of the world news. Quite impressive 8 minute news bulletin at 8am.

Does anyone know when live programming came back as I have a feeling the first few days of the strike was just back to back filler programmes.
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#2

Over the course of two weeks, there was a 30min news updates with programmes filling the gaps.  A reduced normal service resumed on Monday 7th December with Good morning Britain airing between 8am - 8.30, over the course of  December it was increased.  In January TVAM was sent down under as part of Australia 200 birthday, that included Timmy. 

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Batman did stay at 7.30 for a while,  IE 6.30 - 7.30: Richard Keys  live - Batman 8.00 - 9.00 Anna Dimond live
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On 16 February sacked the station's locked out staff , over the course of a month including the weekends TVAM tried to restore a full service.    Timmy is live with Wide awake club but well take a look...

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Batman left on Friday 4th March 1988 and a lot of people complained
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#3

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Tv-am often broadcast Batman episodes out of sequence- not really good for a show made up mostly of 2 part episodes.
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#4

Was that when management were running the show in place of striking/locked out technicians and engineers?
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#5

Yes it was, which is likely why such things occurred. I watched a documentry (it was either the World In Action episode from 1988 about the TV-am strike, or the "Storm in an Eggcup" documentry BBC2 aired in 1992) where one of the management put in charge of running VT machines claimed they ran an episode of Flipper backwards, though I don't know how true that was!
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#6

Of course TV-am going down under and broadcasting from Australia was relatively easy to arrange due to Bruce Gyngell originally being from and having worked in Australia, and IIRC helped set up Channel 9 when it started over there. And of course it was another way round the strike.

Believe the imported/pre-recorded (Batman and the like) were only intended to be temporary. Did I read somewhere they aired Flipper as well? I know they were airing Popeye cartoons in the 7:30am slot as well.

Ironic really airing all that stuff helped save their bacon. Even though it wasn't "the" stuff that should have been on air.
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#7

Though the Popeye cartoons pre-dated the strike anyway. TV-am and the Channel 4 Daily as well as the early years of GMTV and The Big Breakfast had a cartoon as part of their shows. That stopped when CBBC started their weekday breakfast show.
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