Following on from yesterday’s Central TV nostalgia, let’s look a franchise back and see some stuff about ATV. First and best place to go is ATLland.net, where alongside normal things like Tiswas and Crossroads they’ve managed to archive things like idents, traillers and ‘ATV Localspots’.
ATV Localspots were sort of like adverts, although they didn’t move — and were useful only if you wanted a caravan, a fur coat in Dudley, an avocado bathroom suite, or a holiday booked on King’s Heath High Street:
Some of the people from the site are also working on a documentary for DVD release all about ATV — called ‘From ATV Land In Colour’:
“using the same low-cost hand-held technology that killed off many much-loved ITV regions, we’re doing it with a sense of style. It’s not a bunch of anoraks wondering round the outside of the studios for an hour with a wobbly camcorder out of the specials bin at Argos. A lot of us have been inside on official invitations in the past few years, and there’s a magical atmosphere there that we’re doing our best to put across in our DVD, using professional software and a contacts book that includes a lot of big names from Central and ATV.”
