[Stooky Bill]

IIRC, by the time they went off air, TVS at Northam had twin Pres suites which pretty much mirrored each other (there were also two Pres studios - one for Late Night Late, the other for short news bulletins / the Hannington opt for Coast for Coast)

Always seemed a bit curious to me how Westcountry's (pre-rec'd) opening junction somehow got on air early.

HTV TX would still have been handling ads for both S4C and Channel 4 in the West until midnight, as well. Presumably Westcountry's full-scale operation meant building a new suite at Culverhouse? (or did it make use of the operation tied up by playing ads)

So could well have been that Meridian used one of those suites for dual running/piloting prior to launch


Westcountry's playout was based in the suite where HTV did the adverts for S4C. But of course it wouldn't have been doing that right up to midnight, probably not even into November. While the suite was converted for Westcountry the S4C ads operation was shifted elsewhere in the building.

They'd have been doing a lot of testing and piloting prior to launch. It's not a simple thing to set up, even though it was piggybacking on an existing playout operation. I think there was a lot of joint running, certainly the HTV and Westcountry overnight schedules were identical and the junctions obviously run to the same timings.

As for how it got to air early.... a mistake by someone at NTL