This is probably one of my favourite random TH-cam finds - thoroughly THOROUGHLY enjoyed this, especially as a massive TV geek myself! So much nostalgia and eye-opening moments, and really unlocking a chamber of time that feels very fever dreamy. Looking forward to bingeing the rest of your videos - the Channel 4 breakfast series is gold!
Thanks for this! Fond memories of watching satellite TV at my grandparents house in the late 80s - they had a huge dish in their back garden that you had to move using a control box in the living room to line up with the different Astra satellites. Loved watching Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 on UK Gold, DJ Cat and Inspector Gadget on TCC and Unsolved Mysteries on Sky One. My brother and I also thought it was hilarious to watch German channels like Pro Sieben. I also remember when the Astra 1D satellite was launched in the 90s and watching the SES information video channel 😄
👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼 It's not the same any more. I'd kill to be able to watch foreign TV at home. I like to immerse myself in other languages when I go away and the best way to do that is to put the TV on as background noise. The only language I try not to do that with any more is Russian because I now understand too much of Putin's bullshit propaganda for it to be good to watch (not that I've been to Russia recently -- and even then my last trip was only on a guided tour when we were picked up and dropped off by the company at the cruise ship and not able to go out alone -- but I go places with a significant Russian diaspora so there are quite a number of ways to access Russian TV outside the borders of Russia itself). I even timed myself to be back at the hotel once in order to watch a particular Lithuanian folk music show. I'm better at vocabulary in a lot of languages than I am at putting things together in complete sentences, but actually listening to normal people speaking the language is enough to get a sense for how to speak it as well as what it all means. My dad got us Sky TV when his football team Bolton went up into the Premiership and he could only watch those matches on satellite. I used to sneak downstairs in the middle of the night and watch Spitting Image when UK Gold showed it at very random times. I would have tried to tape it but had no clue how to connect the VCR to satellite TV. The most that they actually seemed to use it for was Christmas Day slumped in front of Discovery Home channel watching fishing or people building log cabins or whatever. My uncle used to come over for Christmas as he was in between partners, so he and my dad would slowly marinate in whisky while watching the admittedly quite interesting and relaxing shows. (Better than later on when my dad went through a phase of watching schlocky Nicholas Cage movies and my husband made relentless fun of what we all had to watch when we went round to their place.) I got hooked on things like Seconds From Disaster and Air Crash Investigation and it's really hard to find a streaming service that consistently offers those programmes to watch on demand :((((. My parents graduated to digital TV in the 2000s and then got rid of their box when they upgraded to a digital Freeview TV which had many more channels anyway. They were the ones struggling to work out how to connect the Sky box to the new TV and gave up, and cancelled their subscription when they realised that they weren't bothered about ever reconnecting the box. Sky used to ring us incessantly to get us to resubscribe -- I was still living at home, so I took the majority of the calls, and eventually I told them that mum and dad had unsubscribed because they didn't watch anything on Sky at all and to please not bother us again. They thankfully obliged. I now only really watch normal TV for big events like the Coronation or Remembrance. Everything else is on-demand. Normal TV serves a purpose still but its heyday is well and truly over. I subscribed to Now TV for a bit but found I was only really watching the true crime and reality stuff so found cheaper ways of doing that.
It's really great to read all the stories here and how similar they are: us as young kids dying for cable/satellite tv and more channels, more choice. And it's not just Britain or Ireland. My experience here in NL was very much the same. We got temporary cable in 1987, I remember it very vividly. My parents didn't want a subscription as our roof antenna had just been replaced just a few month earlier (the old one had been struck by lightning). Alas, they did want to have the free connection as it was said it would be very expensive to get a connection later on. With the connection also came a free test subscription for three months. Man, did I love that! Besides the two main Dutch public channels and the three German public channels we already had from the roof aerial, it also added a fourth German public (regional) channel, German commercial station RTL Plus, Sky Channel and Super Channel. I absolutely loved RTL and definitely the Saturday morning cartoons on SKY! Who doesn't remember _that?_ who was a kid back then?! 4 hours of cartoons and kids programming, I couldn't believe it. In fact it was the reason the Dutch public broadcaster also started such morning kids program and it wasn't bad, but is was only two hours, on Sunday rather than Saturday and of course it had to be culturally acceptable. Besides the cool stuff like GI Joe and Inspector Gadget there were many shows back then that were on the one hand quite ingenious and creative, but also often very moralistic. I liked the first, but very much disliked the latter. Even at 10-12 years old I recognized that apparent 'need' to educate us by some programming and I didn't like it. A few years later when our cable connection was sadly long gone, my older brother got a satellite receiver for Astra and could watch it in his room. The channels were back! Aah, the golden days of analog Astra in the early nineties, such great memories. Eventually we got our cable back again, now with much more channels including Dutch commercial channels, which had been legalized in 1989. I bought a satellite system myself in 2000 and have been watching sat since. Sadly, the programming for most channels is very poor now. My kid version won't believe what I'm saying now, but there's simply too many channels. As a result, many of them are filled with garbage and endless commercials. Where are the times of two main public channels, two main commercial channels, a couple of specialized channels like MTV for music, SKY for general entertainment for a younger audience and perhaps something cultural/educational but no more than ten and no more than 6-7 minutes of commercials per hour? Programming would become a lot better I think.
My mums family is Dutch and in the 80s we used to spend the summer holidays there. Grandparents had Dutch cable tv, remember there was a Sky channel which had loads of kids programs on it fronted by DJ Cat. That was great but there was also a channel called Veronica which had soft core porn on it late at night, I got caught several times watching it in the middle of the night by my nan 😂
@@sargonsblackgrandfather2072 Yes, Veronica was the most commercial within the Dutch public broadcasting system which doesn't have state channels like the BBC but different broadcasters allocated time on member numbers. Veronica was once an immensely popular pirate radio station in the North Sea during the sixties and earl seventies, so obviously the government closed it down because why allow a radio station that plays what the people actually want to hear? Can't have that of course. So then Veronica joined the public broadcasters and introduced _Pin Up Club_ which is the soft core porn show you watched. I doubt any other public broadcaster anywhere else in the world had that! 😂
This is the British TV channel documentary I've wanted for the last 15 years. (Though it's probably for the best that my 9 year old self didn’t watch this)
As a bit of an otherworldly autistic kid who grew up in the 80s, I thought satellite TV was actually broadcast from the satellite itself -- and all the newscasters on Sky lived up there and read the news from space. It was really disappointing to find out Sky's studios were in London like everyone else's. As a woman, tbh, I'd prefer being treated with care to being knocked about a bit. Butterflies are very pretty and make better lifestyle idents than a hammer or explosion or whatever.
I think it's completely logical to come to that conclusion when you're connecting the dots. Plus shows like Star trek Deep space 9 or babylon 5 where they live in space, and real life space stations on the news, there is a lot of influence that can form a mental image and sometimes brains just mash all that information up.
In the 80s and 90s I lived on the east coast (Clacton on sea) and has a large mast in the back garden with Aerials pointing towards The Netherlands, Belgium and France which gave me an extra 9 unique channels. I can add some supplemental info. Telechat was actually a French tv show. It seems like it had an English dub done. Pin up club was a Dutch soft porn show from the Netherlands with a very catchy tune. The Dutch tv channels were great. They re-run a huge amount of old British shows. The Goodies, Some Mothers do ave em and Are you being served to name a few. I also remember Super channel when it launched. I had a 1.2M dish at the time and used to watch their reruns of Game for a laugh amongst other things. I still have some of the satellite TV guides and video recordings of the time. Great memories.
Cablevision and Scientific Atlanta boxes here in Norwich. I used to open the local hub, connect people up and wire their VHF TVs up and get them several free channels via analogue. Good times!
This exhausted me. Well done on putting this together, especially the history of local cable in the UK, not to mention the good old days of pan-European TV.
Growing up in Swindon, I had Swindon Cable. Loved it. Seeing the "Cable Television guide" I'd love to get some hard copies of that! I also recall late night HVC broadcasting :-)
Love these videos mate I'm a complete nerd for this shit too I remember stuff that most don't but have no desire to make videos so people like you and Kim justice are doing amazing work. That children's channel took me back think they rebranded it to TCC I remember something on there called Sophie socket & the ratkan rocket. We got Sky TV in 1990 so I Remember DJ Kat as well
TELECAT!!! Man.. The Children's Channel was my fave. This video is bringing back soo many memories. We had United Artists cable from 1986 onwards in Croydon. Still remember Cable 17 hahaha
Thanks for that, brought back some (good?) memories. We had cable tv in Dublin since forever, as so many people had erected 20m high aerials to pull in the BBC and ITV from Wales / NI that it was becoming a hazard to aviation! So six channel cable tv was born, with RTE1 and 2 along with BBC 1 NI, BBC 2, Ulster TV and Channel 4. In 1987 they started experimenting with adding additional channels ultimately settling on Sky Channel and Super. Later in 1987 they added The Children's Channel leading to an interesting problem for us as it was the 9th tv channel and our telly only had 8 buttons for preset channels!
Yes, Cablelink gave us Sky and Super in April 1987, or thereabouts. I think some areas of Dublin had it for about a year before that. Cablelink was the successor to what was RTÉ Relays.
I still remember the time we got Cablelink installed. Our whole road was done at the same time and everyone was going nuts. Great times during the summer hols watching the old gameshows on Sky One and Lifestyle.
Back in the day having sky was some kind of mythical thing, you were either in the exclusive club ot not. In the present day ive cancelled mine as i realised the only stuff i was recording was free to air.
For me, satellite and cable was always an exotic land on the horizon, forever just beyond reach. As a kid, most people I knew had one or the other, but never my household. I wanted it so badly. I'd gaze in awe at friends' TV's whenever they were watching The Simpsons or something. The first I remember TV expanding beyond the four channels was around the turn of the 90's. Suddenly, it seemed like some three quarters of all houses had a large white Amstrad Fidelity satellite dish plastered to the wall. Hardly ever saw a BSB squarial. Around 1993, cable announced its imminent arrival in my city by turfing up the entire neighbourhood's pavements and roads. The disruption was huge, and I resented them for destroying long-standing patchworks on the pavement, along my stretch, which had acted as markers for games of British Bulldog and whatnot for me and my mates since I was little. This was the point where masses of people switched from satellite to cable. I can't remember the fine details of it all, but the upshot of it was that it was cheaper, had most of the channels which people really wanted, and the big deal maker was that you got a free landline phone connection with free calls to other cable phone users between 6pm to 6am weekdays, 24 hours a day at weekends. Still, my family resisted. By the time I became an adult, digital began to splutter into existence. I still wanted multi channels, but now that the bill would be my responsibility to pay it somehow didn't seem quite so attractive anymore. Then Freeview became a thing, followed by on demand content online. So pay TV was no longer a desire for me, I had enough for my needs. I must be one of very few people who has never once had any kind of subscription TV in any of my homes. My earliest memory of TV beyond the four terrestrial channels was at my two great-great aunties' flat. They had a Rediffusion wall socket, with a thick wire running from it to their black & white TV. I asked lots of questions about what it was, which were answered as being relay TV for people who struggled to get a signal with an aerial. From what I gathered, there were also some other channels available through it. I didn't fully understand it then, I still don't fully understand it now. But the fact that they had more than four channels was all I needed to know, and it captivated me. My local cable TV broadcaster operated from a tinpot little unit on a small industrial park just down the road from me. I'd popped in there a few times, for reasons I can't remember, and it was like a magical kingdom. From the reception area, you could briefly glimpse the operation in action whenever an employee opened a door. I now realise that it was a very bare-bones setup, but at the time it was amazing to see the workings of a TV broadcast company.
I was a lucky kid as my parents had sky in 1990 so I was watching the likes of the children’s channel (later tcc) and watching hello by twinkle on the lifestyle satellite jukebox! I was 9 years old!
It’s funny how many of these channels filled early cable in the Netherlands due to the satellite signal of Sky and BSB leaking over our country. They usually inserted Dutch subtitling, or no subs at all. Eventually a bunch of the channels got localised completely, but a bunch of the intros look super familiar to me as a young lad in Amsterdam back then.. Definitively helped my British English, during my formative years, now that I live in the UK 😄
I remember here in Finland my sister had cable in the 80s. It had Music Box, Sky Channel, Eurosport and french TV5. Later Sky Channel stopped broadcasting Europe wide and was replaced by Super Channel . Also Music Box stopped being separate channel and became segment in Super Channel if I remember correctly. After that soon became MTV Europe.
The same memories for me. Having had Sky B.S.B. On Digitial and Pan-European channels at 19.2 degrees east. Many happy days. My fvourite channel TELECLUB.
Brilliant video and brilliant commentary. I grew up in Swindon so the idents etc are very nostalgic. How amateurish it all looks now but amazing at the time given the alternative. I’m still laughing at “I know what women like, butterflies” 😂
I still to this day can remember when my family got sky tv!! I was so excited back in 1991. I would say only the arrival of the internet rivals the dawn of satellite tv👍🏻
Huh I didn't realise Eurosport ever aired WWF. We got Sky in 92 and WWF was on Sky One so I assumed it always was 😅 although live specials were on Sky Movies + too. I miss those simpler times. Sky One, The Movie Channel, Screen Sport, Eurosport, TCC, Family Channel, UK Gold, MTV, CMT and VH1. That was pretty much it. Too many channels now.
Yeah I got Sky in 1990 it directly led to me being a WWF fan & I remember watching it on sky one & I remember royal rumble,mania, survivor series being on sky sports but I never once watched it in Eurosport I avoided that channel my entire youth. Love how your name is stinger splash mines what would Roddy Piper do definitely products of our generation mate haha
The Children's Channel (TCC) is the BEST!!! Thomas & Friends aired on that channel!!! I Wish it was still alive & kicking & also here's some missed opportunities for TCC: 1. air Thomas & Friends from 1987-1998/2000 because I love that show & I can imagine was the promos & airings look like from 1987-1998/2000 2. Air The Magical World of Gigi from late 1985-1998/2000 because the 1st ova was only released in the UK & the USA. I love the opportunity to air the show on TCC from late 1985-1998/2000 & I also want vhs releases from The Video Collection from 1986-late 1995, toys by Hasbro from 1985-late 1990 & many merch from 1985-late 1993 & 3. Air Mio Mao from 1984-1998/2000 because why not.
Also The Magical World of Gigi would air on Nickelodeon in the USA from early 1986-late 2002 & have toys by Hasbro from 1986-late 1991 & other merch from 1986-late 1994 & vhs releases from Goodtimes Entertainment from 1987-late 1996.
I miss ScreenSport. When English football clubs were banned from European competitions after the Heysel disaster in 1985, the 1985/86 season had a replacement competition called the ScreenSport Super Cup.
Live in rural Northumberland and have to say that cable is a thing that never existed at all here. Still doesn't, even for interwebs, still use the phone line(not dial up, but 40mbit ADSL) to connect. Got Sky in, what must've been '89(I was 6, so yeah, date may not be accurate) as there was Sky One and News, but no Movies or Sports yet. I remember the big deal with having to get an extra decoder box since our box didn't have a slot for a viewing card to get the latter channels.
As an american, this is all very very interesting! seems theres lots of footage of these compared to, say, american channels which you'd find only commercials and only super iconic channel bumpers. Also that lifestyles channel looks VERY similar to a channel over here called Lifetime.
Just curious when did lifestyle satellite jukebox start? Many websites say it started in 1990 while others said it was the late 80s. Either way thanks for uploading this video
22:42 Having never watched The Children's Channel before (deprived childhood with just four channels) I thought of 'Dreamer' as soon as it came on. But who ripped off who?
I've been sitting on the dreamer bit for a while but i had chance to mention it haha. Supertramp's dreamer came out in 1975 so I'd not be surprised if the person who made it was inspired by it.
@@jonkasonic I suspect the person was inspired by 'Dreamer', ten years after it appeared on Supertramp's 1974 album, 'Crime of the Century'. Then again, BBC used a snatch of 'Brother Where You Bound' by the same group on a midweek sports programme other than 'Sportsnight'. Then again, the musician might have used the same electric piano as Roger Hodgson, which was the Fender Rhodes.
Here are a few others i wonder if you would consider talking on... 1.the parliamentary channel (turned into bbc parliament in 98) 2.Travel (tv that takes you there..) 3.Front Row (telewest film channel) 4.ZEE TV 5. The Performance channel (opera/classical/inside the actors studio) 6.channel one 7. SelecTV (precursor to carlton select) 8. Landscape channel/art of landscape
Such a good video. Took me back to a time I’d long forgotten. I massively laughed at 14.02 when you called NTL ‘wankers’ for reneging on their on demand movies promise 😂
I was still in primary school when cable launched in my home town of East Kilbride. I was desperate to get it but my parents weren't interested. I knew all the channels as I had read up about them. In 1989/1990 can't remember which year we got a two week trial of Sky Television which lasted 8 months! When they came to pick up the equipment we had moved house. Kept telling my parents don't phone them! But they did. Eventutally we got cable: Scotcable. Dreadful service. Eventually United Artists bought it and had better picture quality and channels in stereo. I had Sky digital from 2000-2008. I cancelled as I realised I was watching Freeview channels on it. Now we have on demand. Rarely watch broadcast television.
You are good, I enjoy your presenting style, but there is too much junk at the front end of the vid. You just need to tigthen your editing a little. Overall though, really enjoyed this, new sub :)
Only four channels where I was lol. Cable was unheard off. Depends where you lived I guess, I didn't know it existed. First mention of other channels was the dire straits song money for nothing, which showed us MTV. That we assumed was solely an American thing. Satellite and cable for us was the nineties.
I think we got a dish around Christmas 1987/88 when I was about 8, and it was before sky, or sky as we know it, we did however have MTV which was free to air. It felt like looking into a secret world. I'm sure MTV once claimed their Ray Cokes show was the highest rated show in all of Europe, as the channel was free to air to anyone who could receive it across the continent. I actually remember hating how it all went from being totally wild and disorganized to slowly all being commercial by the mid 90s. I used to sit awake at night in the school holidays searching the channels, and you'd find all sorts of test signals in the night, really weird stuff.
You forgot Washington Cable. It didn’t have its own channel but we got Sky 1, UK Gold and TCC automatically if you lived in certain parts of Washington (Tyne and Wear)
I couldn’t believe what they did to Bravo. I loved that channel and today Talking Puctures TV doesn’t come anywhere close. And then that Sunday night when at 8pm, it turned into that crap lads channel. In all the years the news version was on, I think I only watched Alias
it’s great seeing tv coverage history about Britain instead of America. in spite of living between the south hampshire & SE Dorset metropolitan areas which house nearly a million & a half folks , tv was pretty shite where we lived before 1989 & if you couldn’t afford Sky it was still shite. reading Look-in in the 1970s made us realise it was rubbish even then compared to neighbouring regions because London or HTV saw pop music shows we never got to see because Southern preferred Out Of Town… one sunday afternoon in 1990 my chum & me rolled back from the pub & instead of sitting through Murder She Wrote embarked on a 1 week timeline to buy an 18E ariel with Green tip & a chimney lashing kit just so we could see Bristol Rovers or Swindon Town highlights getting shown on The West Match during sunday afternoon because BBC South & TVS didn’t bother with local soccer. the signal would get scrambled each time a plane lined itself up to land at Bournemouth Airport but this beat Angela Lansbury & Co. Come 1997 anyone west of The Needles couldn’t see newly launched C5 either. ❤️ to Andy Partridge & Mike Channon from the land of never ending Fred Dinage 😁👍
I love looking at british culture. I mean it has it's things I'd rather not associate with but there's so much nostalgia and so many memories in tv whether that's on or off screen and it's like planting Mini trees in how it can sprout off a memory and lead to others.
It was totally unforgivable what they did to Bravo. It would have been better to have closed it down and relaunch it with a different name. Never watched it after that relaunch apart from 'Alias'.
the "horror channel" phase was pretty sick and produced possibly the only intentionally scary idents ever, but the softcore porn for 20 year old men with no game era wasn't great yeah
You can find Fox kids, Jettix and Disney XD in Episode 3 and a bit ( th-cam.com/video/PL3f-odOvx4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=jeVbpz7OxSIkhGVe ) episode 2 has Nickelodeon, cartoon network. Episode 4 also has Minimax, Episode 5 has Kika and Episode 9 has Cnx, Toonami, kix and popgirl ( th-cam.com/video/NOf5BYc-4fc/w-d-xo.htmlsi=ZhjAI4_lHz2gycuK ) and planning on doing a disney network one next year. :)
Nah, most people couldn't afford the tech. I myself never had satellite OR cable in my home until my parents saw a reason to buy a package. The package turned out to be the first cable broadband connection from blueyonder, which came with a Telewest cable box. I was blown away as cable or satellite was something I had only experienced in a few lucky neighbors' houses (whose parents had money to burn I suppose)
Thank you for reply . But tv is changing. Look how many are dumping tv tax . BBC can sit on arse show repeats and get free money. They waste money . If I watch live football why do I have to pay them as well. Dump the BBC
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This whole video is narrated with the energy of someone whose producer has told him he's got to go to news and sport in five seconds.
But a 2 min wait to get to the actual start of the video
wait until lil bud discovers their right arrow key @@kriss_b
This is probably one of my favourite random TH-cam finds - thoroughly THOROUGHLY enjoyed this, especially as a massive TV geek myself! So much nostalgia and eye-opening moments, and really unlocking a chamber of time that feels very fever dreamy.
Looking forward to bingeing the rest of your videos - the Channel 4 breakfast series is gold!
This is absolutely brilliant. I'm a huge nostalgia addict!! As well as old television stuff from the 1980's!!
I am from the US and thanks for sharing with us all what UK tv was like back then
Thanks for this! Fond memories of watching satellite TV at my grandparents house in the late 80s - they had a huge dish in their back garden that you had to move using a control box in the living room to line up with the different Astra satellites. Loved watching Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 on UK Gold, DJ Cat and Inspector Gadget on TCC and Unsolved Mysteries on Sky One. My brother and I also thought it was hilarious to watch German channels like Pro Sieben. I also remember when the Astra 1D satellite was launched in the 90s and watching the SES information video channel 😄
👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼 It's not the same any more. I'd kill to be able to watch foreign TV at home. I like to immerse myself in other languages when I go away and the best way to do that is to put the TV on as background noise. The only language I try not to do that with any more is Russian because I now understand too much of Putin's bullshit propaganda for it to be good to watch (not that I've been to Russia recently -- and even then my last trip was only on a guided tour when we were picked up and dropped off by the company at the cruise ship and not able to go out alone -- but I go places with a significant Russian diaspora so there are quite a number of ways to access Russian TV outside the borders of Russia itself). I even timed myself to be back at the hotel once in order to watch a particular Lithuanian folk music show. I'm better at vocabulary in a lot of languages than I am at putting things together in complete sentences, but actually listening to normal people speaking the language is enough to get a sense for how to speak it as well as what it all means.
My dad got us Sky TV when his football team Bolton went up into the Premiership and he could only watch those matches on satellite. I used to sneak downstairs in the middle of the night and watch Spitting Image when UK Gold showed it at very random times. I would have tried to tape it but had no clue how to connect the VCR to satellite TV.
The most that they actually seemed to use it for was Christmas Day slumped in front of Discovery Home channel watching fishing or people building log cabins or whatever. My uncle used to come over for Christmas as he was in between partners, so he and my dad would slowly marinate in whisky while watching the admittedly quite interesting and relaxing shows. (Better than later on when my dad went through a phase of watching schlocky Nicholas Cage movies and my husband made relentless fun of what we all had to watch when we went round to their place.) I got hooked on things like Seconds From Disaster and Air Crash Investigation and it's really hard to find a streaming service that consistently offers those programmes to watch on demand :((((.
My parents graduated to digital TV in the 2000s and then got rid of their box when they upgraded to a digital Freeview TV which had many more channels anyway. They were the ones struggling to work out how to connect the Sky box to the new TV and gave up, and cancelled their subscription when they realised that they weren't bothered about ever reconnecting the box. Sky used to ring us incessantly to get us to resubscribe -- I was still living at home, so I took the majority of the calls, and eventually I told them that mum and dad had unsubscribed because they didn't watch anything on Sky at all and to please not bother us again. They thankfully obliged.
I now only really watch normal TV for big events like the Coronation or Remembrance. Everything else is on-demand. Normal TV serves a purpose still but its heyday is well and truly over. I subscribed to Now TV for a bit but found I was only really watching the true crime and reality stuff so found cheaper ways of doing that.
Love this, feels like Applemask/Bob the Fish's ITV in the Face but Satellite related!
Thanks, yeah I really enjoy his videos, he did a series called square peg that looks at the story of sky and bsb which was really good.
You’re taking me back to my childhood. Bloody Telecat, what a blast from the past! The Children’s Channel was awesome!
It's really great to read all the stories here and how similar they are: us as young kids dying for cable/satellite tv and more channels, more choice. And it's not just Britain or Ireland. My experience here in NL was very much the same. We got temporary cable in 1987, I remember it very vividly.
My parents didn't want a subscription as our roof antenna had just been replaced just a few month earlier (the old one had been struck by lightning). Alas, they did want to have the free connection as it was said it would be very expensive to get a connection later on. With the connection also came a free test subscription for three months. Man, did I love that!
Besides the two main Dutch public channels and the three German public channels we already had from the roof aerial, it also added a fourth German public (regional) channel, German commercial station RTL Plus, Sky Channel and Super Channel.
I absolutely loved RTL and definitely the Saturday morning cartoons on SKY! Who doesn't remember _that?_ who was a kid back then?! 4 hours of cartoons and kids programming, I couldn't believe it. In fact it was the reason the Dutch public broadcaster also started such morning kids program and it wasn't bad, but is was only two hours, on Sunday rather than Saturday and of course it had to be culturally acceptable.
Besides the cool stuff like GI Joe and Inspector Gadget there were many shows back then that were on the one hand quite ingenious and creative, but also often very moralistic. I liked the first, but very much disliked the latter. Even at 10-12 years old I recognized that apparent 'need' to educate us by some programming and I didn't like it.
A few years later when our cable connection was sadly long gone, my older brother got a satellite receiver for Astra and could watch it in his room. The channels were back! Aah, the golden days of analog Astra in the early nineties, such great memories.
Eventually we got our cable back again, now with much more channels including Dutch commercial channels, which had been legalized in 1989. I bought a satellite system myself in 2000 and have been watching sat since. Sadly, the programming for most channels is very poor now. My kid version won't believe what I'm saying now, but there's simply too many channels. As a result, many of them are filled with garbage and endless commercials.
Where are the times of two main public channels, two main commercial channels, a couple of specialized channels like MTV for music, SKY for general entertainment for a younger audience and perhaps something cultural/educational but no more than ten and no more than 6-7 minutes of commercials per hour? Programming would become a lot better I think.
My mums family is Dutch and in the 80s we used to spend the summer holidays there. Grandparents had Dutch cable tv, remember there was a Sky channel which had loads of kids programs on it fronted by DJ Cat. That was great but there was also a channel called Veronica which had soft core porn on it late at night, I got caught several times watching it in the middle of the night by my nan 😂
@@sargonsblackgrandfather2072 Yes, Veronica was the most commercial within the Dutch public broadcasting system which doesn't have state channels like the BBC but different broadcasters allocated time on member numbers.
Veronica was once an immensely popular pirate radio station in the North Sea during the sixties and earl seventies, so obviously the government closed it down because why allow a radio station that plays what the people actually want to hear? Can't have that of course.
So then Veronica joined the public broadcasters and introduced _Pin Up Club_ which is the soft core porn show you watched. I doubt any other public broadcaster anywhere else in the world had that! 😂
This is a pretty good video you made here. Can't wait for future videos like this one.
Thank you, done the script and some other bits already including a bit where the yorkshire tv logo sneaks into other idents.
I'm fairly certain the voice at 17:13 is that of the hologram who reads the news on groovy funky Channel 27!
11:13 The same music used for RTE News between around 1984 to around 1988
I was going to post the same thing, it was so weird to hear that music associated with anything else but the RTE News
Good work and thanks for the name check!
Thank you! :D Great to hear from you :)
@@jonkasonic I only came across your video by accident but enjoyed it, great pace and very enthusiastic.
So much genius editing in this -- a puppet Emu doing a Black Eyed Peas bit 👍🤣. My sort of humour😁
This is the British TV channel documentary I've wanted for the last 15 years.
(Though it's probably for the best that my 9 year old self didn’t watch this)
As a bit of an otherworldly autistic kid who grew up in the 80s, I thought satellite TV was actually broadcast from the satellite itself -- and all the newscasters on Sky lived up there and read the news from space.
It was really disappointing to find out Sky's studios were in London like everyone else's.
As a woman, tbh, I'd prefer being treated with care to being knocked about a bit. Butterflies are very pretty and make better lifestyle idents than a hammer or explosion or whatever.
I think it's completely logical to come to that conclusion when you're connecting the dots. Plus shows like Star trek Deep space 9 or babylon 5 where they live in space, and real life space stations on the news, there is a lot of influence that can form a mental image and sometimes brains just mash all that information up.
@@jonkasonic Yeah, definitely :) 😁.
Background music at 9:16 was RTE News theme tune in the 80s
I am now going to frantically search for video clips of Telecat.
I found them, but they are all French. I have thought about over dubbing a few episodes for fun
youtube.com/@zouack5717
Very enjoyable watch this. Well done. Love all this old footage
In the 80s and 90s I lived on the east coast (Clacton on sea) and has a large mast in the back garden with Aerials pointing towards The Netherlands, Belgium and France which gave me an extra 9 unique channels. I can add some supplemental info. Telechat was actually a French tv show. It seems like it had an English dub done. Pin up club was a Dutch soft porn show from the Netherlands with a very catchy tune. The Dutch tv channels were great. They re-run a huge amount of old British shows. The Goodies, Some Mothers do ave em and Are you being served to name a few. I also remember Super channel when it launched. I had a 1.2M dish at the time and used to watch their reruns of Game for a laugh amongst other things. I still have some of the satellite TV guides and video recordings of the time. Great memories.
Cablevision and Scientific Atlanta boxes here in Norwich. I used to open the local hub, connect people up and wire their VHF TVs up and get them several free channels via analogue. Good times!
This exhausted me. Well done on putting this together, especially the history of local cable in the UK, not to mention the good old days of pan-European TV.
Excellent stuff mate.
Love it.
Growing up in Swindon, I had Swindon Cable. Loved it. Seeing the "Cable Television guide" I'd love to get some hard copies of that! I also recall late night HVC broadcasting :-)
Four channels? You lucky bastards! In Sweden we only had two. I wanted a satellite dish soo badly back then!
Love these videos mate I'm a complete nerd for this shit too I remember stuff that most don't but have no desire to make videos so people like you and Kim justice are doing amazing work. That children's channel took me back think they rebranded it to TCC I remember something on there called Sophie socket & the ratkan rocket. We got Sky TV in 1990 so I Remember DJ Kat as well
TELECAT!!! Man.. The Children's Channel was my fave. This video is bringing back soo many memories. We had United Artists cable from 1986 onwards in Croydon. Still remember Cable 17 hahaha
That telephone was petrifying 😂 brilliant work on this mate, brought back alot of childhood memories 😊 well researched and really well put together 👍🏻
Thanks for that, brought back some (good?) memories. We had cable tv in Dublin since forever, as so many people had erected 20m high aerials to pull in the BBC and ITV from Wales / NI that it was becoming a hazard to aviation! So six channel cable tv was born, with RTE1 and 2 along with BBC 1 NI, BBC 2, Ulster TV and Channel 4. In 1987 they started experimenting with adding additional channels ultimately settling on Sky Channel and Super. Later in 1987 they added The Children's Channel leading to an interesting problem for us as it was the 9th tv channel and our telly only had 8 buttons for preset channels!
Yes, Cablelink gave us Sky and Super in April 1987, or thereabouts. I think some areas of Dublin had it for about a year before that. Cablelink was the successor to what was RTÉ Relays.
I still remember the time we got Cablelink installed. Our whole road was done at the same time and everyone was going nuts. Great times during the summer hols watching the old gameshows on Sky One and Lifestyle.
We still have that Cablelink box in our front room taking the signal in from the outside wall, Virgin comes through it now.
Great vids of old tv youve done . Hope to see more like this
I have just finished binge watching Jupiter Moon that was on Galaxy. Only ever saw clips before. Glad I found it, it was very enjoyable!
Back in the day having sky was some kind of mythical thing, you were either in the exclusive club ot not. In the present day ive cancelled mine as i realised the only stuff i was recording was free to air.
For me, satellite and cable was always an exotic land on the horizon, forever just beyond reach. As a kid, most people I knew had one or the other, but never my household. I wanted it so badly. I'd gaze in awe at friends' TV's whenever they were watching The Simpsons or something. The first I remember TV expanding beyond the four channels was around the turn of the 90's. Suddenly, it seemed like some three quarters of all houses had a large white Amstrad Fidelity satellite dish plastered to the wall. Hardly ever saw a BSB squarial. Around 1993, cable announced its imminent arrival in my city by turfing up the entire neighbourhood's pavements and roads. The disruption was huge, and I resented them for destroying long-standing patchworks on the pavement, along my stretch, which had acted as markers for games of British Bulldog and whatnot for me and my mates since I was little. This was the point where masses of people switched from satellite to cable. I can't remember the fine details of it all, but the upshot of it was that it was cheaper, had most of the channels which people really wanted, and the big deal maker was that you got a free landline phone connection with free calls to other cable phone users between 6pm to 6am weekdays, 24 hours a day at weekends. Still, my family resisted. By the time I became an adult, digital began to splutter into existence. I still wanted multi channels, but now that the bill would be my responsibility to pay it somehow didn't seem quite so attractive anymore. Then Freeview became a thing, followed by on demand content online. So pay TV was no longer a desire for me, I had enough for my needs. I must be one of very few people who has never once had any kind of subscription TV in any of my homes.
My earliest memory of TV beyond the four terrestrial channels was at my two great-great aunties' flat. They had a Rediffusion wall socket, with a thick wire running from it to their black & white TV. I asked lots of questions about what it was, which were answered as being relay TV for people who struggled to get a signal with an aerial. From what I gathered, there were also some other channels available through it. I didn't fully understand it then, I still don't fully understand it now. But the fact that they had more than four channels was all I needed to know, and it captivated me.
My local cable TV broadcaster operated from a tinpot little unit on a small industrial park just down the road from me. I'd popped in there a few times, for reasons I can't remember, and it was like a magical kingdom. From the reception area, you could briefly glimpse the operation in action whenever an employee opened a door. I now realise that it was a very bare-bones setup, but at the time it was amazing to see the workings of a TV broadcast company.
I remember my parents bought a cabletron device. All I did was watch The Box and play the multiple games 😬😌
I was a lucky kid as my parents had sky in 1990 so I was watching the likes of the children’s channel (later tcc) and watching hello by twinkle on the lifestyle satellite jukebox! I was 9 years old!
I'm here on a mission, to find my childhood tv memories.
It’s funny how many of these channels filled early cable in the Netherlands due to the satellite signal of Sky and BSB leaking over our country. They usually inserted Dutch subtitling, or no subs at all. Eventually a bunch of the channels got localised completely, but a bunch of the intros look super familiar to me as a young lad in Amsterdam back then..
Definitively helped my British English, during my formative years, now that I live in the UK 😄
I remember here in Finland my sister had cable in the 80s. It had Music Box, Sky Channel, Eurosport and french TV5. Later Sky Channel stopped broadcasting Europe wide and was replaced by Super Channel . Also Music Box stopped being separate channel and became segment in Super Channel if I remember correctly. After that soon became MTV Europe.
i remember that period where Music Box became part of Super Channel, same in Dublin
Man that phone with a face in it is some freaky trip stuff
The same memories for me. Having had Sky B.S.B. On Digitial and Pan-European channels at 19.2 degrees east. Many happy days.
My fvourite channel TELECLUB.
This is absolute gold. I never thought I’d get to see some of this stuff ever again.
Long long time, the sattelite jukebox and the Children's Channel are free to air over sat I could get them in Germany. My favourite channels.
“I’m gunna have to pixelate that now” 😂❤
Brilliant video and brilliant commentary. I grew up in Swindon so the idents etc are very nostalgic. How amateurish it all looks now but amazing at the time given the alternative. I’m still laughing at “I know what women like, butterflies” 😂
What an amazing video! ❤ Thank you! 🙌🙌
I still to this day can remember when my family got sky tv!! I was so excited back in 1991. I would say only the arrival of the internet rivals the dawn of satellite tv👍🏻
awesome!
Huh I didn't realise Eurosport ever aired WWF. We got Sky in 92 and WWF was on Sky One so I assumed it always was 😅 although live specials were on Sky Movies + too. I miss those simpler times. Sky One, The Movie Channel, Screen Sport, Eurosport, TCC, Family Channel, UK Gold, MTV, CMT and VH1. That was pretty much it. Too many channels now.
Yeah I got Sky in 1990 it directly led to me being a WWF fan & I remember watching it on sky one & I remember royal rumble,mania, survivor series being on sky sports but I never once watched it in Eurosport I avoided that channel my entire youth. Love how your name is stinger splash mines what would Roddy Piper do definitely products of our generation mate haha
We had Phillips in Northampton. I had Sky right from 1982 onwards.
The Children's Channel (TCC) is the BEST!!! Thomas & Friends aired on that channel!!! I Wish it was still alive & kicking & also here's some missed opportunities for TCC: 1. air Thomas & Friends from 1987-1998/2000 because I love that show & I can imagine was the promos & airings look like from 1987-1998/2000 2. Air The Magical World of Gigi from late 1985-1998/2000 because the 1st ova was only released in the UK & the USA. I love the opportunity to air the show on TCC from late 1985-1998/2000 & I also want vhs releases from The Video Collection from 1986-late 1995, toys by Hasbro from 1985-late 1990 & many merch from 1985-late 1993 & 3. Air Mio Mao from 1984-1998/2000 because why not.
Also The Magical World of Gigi would air on Nickelodeon in the USA from early 1986-late 2002 & have toys by Hasbro from 1986-late 1991 & other merch from 1986-late 1994 & vhs releases from Goodtimes Entertainment from 1987-late 1996.
Great video - must have taken you ages to edit. Thank you I never had access to this stuff as a kid!
Brilliant !
I miss ScreenSport. When English football clubs were banned from European competitions after the Heysel disaster in 1985, the 1985/86 season had a replacement competition called the ScreenSport Super Cup.
OMG! TELECAT!! I completly forgot about that!! 😂😂
Live in rural Northumberland and have to say that cable is a thing that never existed at all here. Still doesn't, even for interwebs, still use the phone line(not dial up, but 40mbit ADSL) to connect.
Got Sky in, what must've been '89(I was 6, so yeah, date may not be accurate) as there was Sky One and News, but no Movies or Sports yet. I remember the big deal with having to get an extra decoder box since our box didn't have a slot for a viewing card to get the latter channels.
wow even though this is all baso archive footage i love ur editin style! thans yt for recommending it
also ted turner > rupert murdoch
Oh yeah this is the good stuff baby. 46 minutes well spent
As an american, this is all very very interesting! seems theres lots of footage of these compared to, say, american channels which you'd find only commercials and only super iconic channel bumpers. Also that lifestyles channel looks VERY similar to a channel over here called Lifetime.
Good work!
Love this video good job
Welcome back, it's been a long time
Just curious when did lifestyle satellite jukebox start? Many websites say it started in 1990 while others said it was the late 80s. Either way thanks for uploading this video
Bird epilepsy confirmed
22:42 Having never watched The Children's Channel before (deprived childhood with just four channels) I thought of 'Dreamer' as soon as it came on. But who ripped off who?
I've been sitting on the dreamer bit for a while but i had chance to mention it haha. Supertramp's dreamer came out in 1975 so I'd not be surprised if the person who made it was inspired by it.
@@jonkasonic I suspect the person was inspired by 'Dreamer', ten years after it appeared on Supertramp's 1974 album, 'Crime of the Century'. Then again, BBC used a snatch of 'Brother Where You Bound' by the same group on a midweek sports programme other than 'Sportsnight'. Then again, the musician might have used the same electric piano as Roger Hodgson, which was the Fender Rhodes.
I REMEMBER IN THE EARLY 80 S HAVING CABLE VISION WITH THE REDIFFUSION TV SERVICE
Great video
Here are a few others i wonder if you would consider talking on...
1.the parliamentary channel (turned into bbc parliament in 98)
2.Travel (tv that takes you there..)
3.Front Row (telewest film channel)
4.ZEE TV
5. The Performance channel (opera/classical/inside the actors studio)
6.channel one
7. SelecTV (precursor to carlton select)
8. Landscape channel/art of landscape
22:50 me "That sounds like that 70s" song, then you confirm it.
21:20... Who doesn't remember that video from their youth.
'Hello, hello.. The song is crap but we all love the video.....'
Such a good video. Took me back to a time I’d long forgotten. I massively laughed at 14.02 when you called NTL ‘wankers’ for reneging on their on demand movies promise 😂
I was still in primary school when cable launched in my home town of East Kilbride. I was desperate to get it but my parents weren't interested. I knew all the channels as I had read up about them. In 1989/1990 can't remember which year we got a two week trial of Sky Television which lasted 8 months! When they came to pick up the equipment we had moved house. Kept telling my parents don't phone them! But they did. Eventutally we got cable: Scotcable. Dreadful service. Eventually United Artists bought it and had better picture quality and channels in stereo. I had Sky digital from 2000-2008. I cancelled as I realised I was watching Freeview channels on it. Now we have on demand. Rarely watch broadcast television.
Meant to add great video. It takes me back
You are good, I enjoy your presenting style, but there is too much junk at the front end of the vid. You just need to tigthen your editing a little. Overall though, really enjoyed this, new sub :)
Cool thank you for the feedback, much appreciated 😀
Never understood why WHSmith stores were not trying to flog satellite dishes seeing they were broadcasting two channels on Astra.
Which channel did the Tellycat clip come from? I've been trying to find more of the English dub Tellycat for years
Only four channels where I was lol. Cable was unheard off. Depends where you lived I guess, I didn't know it existed. First mention of other channels was the dire straits song money for nothing, which showed us MTV. That we assumed was solely an American thing. Satellite and cable for us was the nineties.
Does anyone know the name of the track used from 38:40?
I think we got a dish around Christmas 1987/88 when I was about 8, and it was before sky, or sky as we know it, we did however have MTV which was free to air. It felt like looking into a secret world. I'm sure MTV once claimed their Ray Cokes show was the highest rated show in all of Europe, as the channel was free to air to anyone who could receive it across the continent. I actually remember hating how it all went from being totally wild and disorganized to slowly all being commercial by the mid 90s. I used to sit awake at night in the school holidays searching the channels, and you'd find all sorts of test signals in the night, really weird stuff.
That’s a young Robbie Williams at around 10:00 right?
He would’ve been a teenager around this time I’d believe
You forgot Washington Cable. It didn’t have its own channel but we got Sky 1, UK Gold and TCC automatically if you lived in certain parts of Washington (Tyne and Wear)
I couldn’t believe what they did to Bravo. I loved that channel and today Talking Puctures TV doesn’t come anywhere close. And then that Sunday night when at 8pm, it turned into that crap lads channel. In all the years the news version was on, I think I only watched Alias
i loved Music Box.
One of the best ever channel idents there at 26:32
And one of the most attractive ones at 32:23
And I missed all this......!!??
If you thought Yorkshire was bad here in the south Southern Television South and Merdian all had sharp edges!
Love the video but the BGM is WAAYYY too loud. It's difficult to hear the narration in many cases.
it’s great seeing tv coverage history about Britain instead of America. in spite of living between the south hampshire & SE Dorset metropolitan areas which house nearly a million & a half folks , tv was pretty shite where we lived before 1989 & if you couldn’t afford Sky it was still shite. reading Look-in in the 1970s made us realise it was rubbish even then compared to neighbouring regions because London or HTV saw pop music shows we never got to see because Southern preferred Out Of Town…
one sunday afternoon in 1990 my chum & me rolled back from the pub & instead of sitting through Murder She Wrote embarked on a 1 week timeline to buy an 18E ariel with Green tip & a chimney lashing kit just so we could see Bristol Rovers or Swindon Town highlights getting shown on The West Match during sunday afternoon because BBC South & TVS didn’t bother with local soccer.
the signal would get scrambled each time a plane lined itself up to land at Bournemouth Airport but this beat Angela Lansbury & Co. Come 1997 anyone west of The Needles couldn’t see newly launched C5 either.
❤️ to Andy Partridge & Mike Channon from the land of never ending Fred Dinage 😁👍
I love looking at british culture. I mean it has it's things I'd rather not associate with but there's so much nostalgia and so many memories in tv whether that's on or off screen and it's like planting Mini trees in how it can sprout off a memory and lead to others.
Ahhh good memories, reminds me of the Modshack/THOiC days and TV piracy lol
Today digital TV offers too much quantity over quality
FACT it was February 1989 when SKY cam to the UK i was one of the first people in the UK to get SKY
I really want to watch It's The News
barbarella! we cheer you up HAHA
25:05 what in the hell is that... this is something that would probably freak me out as a child and never watch tv ever again... *shudder*
The Bluebird & Astra Satellites
It was totally unforgivable what they did to Bravo. It would have been better to have closed it down and relaunch it with a different name. Never watched it after that relaunch apart from 'Alias'.
the "horror channel" phase was pretty sick and produced possibly the only intentionally scary idents ever, but the softcore porn for 20 year old men with no game era wasn't great yeah
You forgot Nynex
Please do playhouse Disney and jetix and for kids and toon Disney 😊
You can find Fox kids, Jettix and Disney XD in Episode 3 and a bit ( th-cam.com/video/PL3f-odOvx4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=jeVbpz7OxSIkhGVe ) episode 2 has Nickelodeon, cartoon network. Episode 4 also has Minimax, Episode 5 has Kika and Episode 9 has Cnx, Toonami, kix and popgirl ( th-cam.com/video/NOf5BYc-4fc/w-d-xo.htmlsi=ZhjAI4_lHz2gycuK ) and planning on doing a disney network one next year. :)
Amazing video. Never knew this. Bet BBC blocked this
Nah, most people couldn't afford the tech. I myself never had satellite OR cable in my home until my parents saw a reason to buy a package. The package turned out to be the first cable broadband connection from blueyonder, which came with a Telewest cable box. I was blown away as cable or satellite was something I had only experienced in a few lucky neighbors' houses (whose parents had money to burn I suppose)
Thank you for reply . But tv is changing. Look how many are dumping tv tax . BBC can sit on arse show repeats and get free money. They waste money . If I watch live football why do I have to pay them as well. Dump the BBC
Didn't the bravo channel become a broadcaster for soft porn after 12am?
Them and men and moters
Who the Fuck was watching this stuff, we had a rotating satellite, the lot.
Not heard of any of these 1980s services
th-cam.com/video/PjGkSnjvc5g/w-d-xo.html about one minute in. I knew the Cinematel background music sounded familiar.
26:00 its Naomi Campbell (if ya get it, ya get it) 😂