The ITV Strike of 1979 | The Strike To End All Strikes | An AMTV Documentary

Superb documentary. Something I thought I'd have absolutely no interest in at all, thoroughly gripped for 14 minutes.

Channel Television had their own arrangement with the unions in 1979, who were not stupid, and knew prolonged industrial action at Channel TV would destroy the company, so the unions agreed to keep the channel on air, but refused to allow Channel have any network programme fed to them from London. Channel TV relied in films, TV movies, regional shows, cartoons, American/Australian/Canadian imports to fill around six hours of television per day during the strike.

Born 1976. I remember a couple of things from this strike: 1. Watching the strike caption with my Grandad and him telling me that "ITV is coming back on tonight, finally". A few days later, he talked about it with my mum. I loved the Michael Samms Singers jingle; still do. 2. I visited Alderney in September 1979 and saw Channel TV in action. My parents were really impressed they were still on air seeing that Granada was on strike.

Nice to see some insight on the ITV strike, it helps to put the BBC strike in perspective also. Mind you, the BBC was always getting hit with strikes, usually at crucial times in the broadcast seasons.

Just two corrections: 1) the ITV regions didn’t all go off on one day, they gradually went off (some going off quickly then coming back on briefly) between 6th and 10th August. There was an excellent Twitter account in 2019 documenting the ITV strike from first rumblings to happy workers returning to work. 2) 6th August wasn’t the start of the poor industrial relations for this strike. The issue of pay behind the strike had actually been brewing for a while. Yorkshire had their strike over Christmas 1978/79, and IIRC STV and Border had had strikes earlier in 1979 followed by almost all regions (bar Westward - whose ACTT members voted not to strike - and Channel) having a one-day strike on 23rd July 1979. On all those occasions the management had managed to placate the unions only for a short time, not actually resolving the issues, which resulted in 11 weeks of strike action.

I'm not a socialist or anything like that but lesson to be learnt here is pay people fairly what they deserve and you'll be okay

I read about this in a Jim Henson biography. It talked about British union's strict rule to stop filming at 8 P.M., often leaving the cast of The Muppet Show in the dark. It would drive Henson and his crew nuts!

A very fair documentary, not taking either side, just giving us the facts. Thanks!

Good watch. As a Crystal Palace fan, this strike has always been talked about, as it coincided with the one and only time our club hit the top position of Div 1 (English footballs top tier). The Big Match (LWT) would have almost definitely featured Palace’s 4-1 home win to Ipswich that shot them to the top, but due to the strike, one of the club’s most prestigious moments was not captured on film. I was actually at the game as a very young lad and do recall it, but would’ve dearly loved to have had it immortalised on screen to enjoy later. There was a chance that BBC’s Match of the Day could’ve shown it but Liverpool and Forest (the country’s two top sides at that point) played each other, so that was their main game. They also featured a Div 2 game which was normal practice back then.

“Mummy, why is Granada blue?” Me. August. 1979. Superb video as always sir :)

One thing that is often forgotten about the ACTT (the technicians union), was that the leadership could not call a strike. Unlike other unions, each individual shop had to call a strike ballot to see if their members supported the action or not. This is why the network did not go off the air all at once. One of the last (if not THE last) was ITN. As I recall, it became increasingly embarrassing to ITV that the only programme they could air was the news, which of course, headlined with the ITV strike! Eventually they managed to "engineer" the shop to strike by "firing" a completely blameless shift leader, which immediately got everyone out! I gather similar action was done at other franchises to ensure solidarity amongst the supposedly independent companies. The funny thing is that most of the engineering grades were highly qualified, and had no problems finding alternative employment during the strike! Indeed some were so successful that they had great difficulty extracting themselves from obligations when the strike was finally called off! Thank you for the interesting (and pretty accurate and balanced) take on this piece of history!

My God, the wasted summer of 1979. I never thought I'd see the Blue Screen of Death again. Great video, well researched as well.

Excellent video! Very well-researched and presented, and also very objective yet also entertaining. I'm very happy to see some power coming back to the workers and their unions in the face of the pandemic; I have no sympathy for wealth-hoarding employers, who wouldn't have that wealth without the labour of their workers.

Strangely I remember nothing about this. Perhaps as a 14 year old lad, I really couldn't care less if there was no Corrie. These days I suspect even less people would notice if ITV went off air.

When ITV did return from their strike, they had a huge headache of putting together a schedule. For the first time since the 1968 strike, their returned meant a proper networked schedule. Unlike what ITV regions used to do, bouncing programmes around the schedule, one fully networked schedule from London was provided to help the channel get back on its feet. Regional variations returned fully within a week or so.

Sapphire and Steel were stopped, but we had an aerial that we stuck out the window to get Southern TV.

This is a trip because I vaguely remember this strike. As a young child I spent hours staring at that blue screen! (I think i was quite fascinated by it) I remember I was confused because the blue screen referred to an 'industrial dispute' when on the news and irl everyone called it a 'strike'. I didn't know what 'industrial dispute' meant, although I quickly picked up from the context that it was the same thing as 'strike'. I think that was the first time I encountered 'idiomatic english vs. formal english' a concept I had hitherto been unaware of (that is a thing that goes back to the norman conquest linguistically-norman french derived words posh, germanic anglo saxon words-common!-the consequences of the norman conquest lived on in 1979!) Also it was weir seeing 'independent television' because I knew the channel as 'itv', I actually didn't know it stood for anything before then!

Top-tier documentary, Adam. Thanks for covering the events of the strike.

I remember the strike well and how unhappy I was that there was daily fix of Crossroads to be had. But, I also remember some of the gems we discovered on BBC2. As a result of this, my dad relented and agreed to start renting us a VHS.

Great video. I remember this strike as a 7 year old and wondered at the time why my parents who were avid Southern Television viewers suddenly started watching BBC1