page_title: Scottish Television
section_title: 1980s
hierarchical_section_title: Scottish Television / History / 1980s
caption_attribution_description: English: STV 35mm Programme caption for 'Stars for Sunday'
context_page_description: Scottish Television is the ITV franchise for Central Scotland. The channel - the largest of the three ITV franchises in Scotland - has been in operation since 31 August 1957 and is the second oldest franchise holder still active.
  STV Central broadcasts from studios at Pacific Quay in Glasgow and is owned and operated by STV Group, which also owns another franchise, Grampian Television, based in Aberdeen. It produces news for the west and east halves of its transmission region along with current affairs and feature programming for Northern and Central Scotland.
  Along with STV North and ITV Border, STV Central is a commercial rival to the publicly funded national broadcaster, BBC Scotland.
context_section_description: During the 1970s and 1980s, Scottish Television produced a wide range of religious programming including weekly church services, half-hour religious programmes on a Sunday, religious contributions to the new Channel 4, the ever-popular epilogue Late Call, and occasional documentaries, produced by Executive Producer Rev. Dr Nelson Gray, a Minister of the Congregational Church, and Rev. Eric Hudson, a Minister of the Church of Scotland but as the public service broadcasting requirement receded during the 1990s, the amount of religious programmes were gradually phased out.
  In October 1981, Scottish Television became the first ITV station to operate a regional Oracle teletext service, containing over 60 pages of local news, sport and information.
  As was industry-practice at the time, STV programming would either be totally studio-based, include film inserts where required (the local news programme Scotland Today and Take the High Road being early examples of this), or other programming such as documentaries and dramas, shot entirely on film. The company employed up to six film crews who could be assigned to providing daily local news coverage, football matches, or feature programming such as Redgauntlet or Weirs Way. Since the company originally went on air, images not provided electronically 'live' within the studio centre were provided via telecine machines, allowing the station to run local advertisements to fill the ad breaks within and on either side of local and networked programming. Local advertisements – where a single image was shown on screen whilst the continuity announcer read the promotional message 'live' – was sourced from a standard 35 mm slide.
  
  Filmed inserts into regional news added a significant delay to the airing of programmes. STV, having no film processing capability of its own at Cowcaddens, sub-contracted this to a specialist company – Humphries Film Laboratories. Exposed film would be rushed to an industrial unit in North Glasgow to be processed and returned to Cowcaddens for the 16 mm film to be edited and prepared for transmission. This process often caused much annoyance to reporters and crews alike, as to ensure inclusion of a breaking news story for Scotland Today, film had to reach the labs no later than 4.30 pm. By the early to mid-1980s, STV had followed the rest of the ITV network in dispensing with film and embracing electronic news gathering, with Sony's Betacam being the chosen system.
  Gus Macdonald became the station's Director of Programmes during the summer of 1986. One of his first decisions was to revamp the station's regional news and features output, following criticism from an Independent Broadcasting Authority committee. Scottish's flagship evening programme Scotland Today had previously been revamped from a regional news programme into a topical magazine show supplemented by short bulletins. David Scott was brought in from BBC Scotland as the station's head of news and reverted Scotland Today back to a hard news format while long-running series including What's Your Problem? and Ways & Means were axed. Replacement programmes included the topical lunchtime show Live at One Thirty and social action series Scottish Action.
  Throughout the 1980s, the company began gaining greater access to the national network, primarily through the soap opera Take the High Road and the long-running detective series Taggart, as well as programming for Channel 4. Towards the end of the decade, game shows  Wheel of Fortune and Fun House began decade-long runs on the ITV network.
caption: STV programme caption
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