19 Facts About Grampian Television

Grampian Television was the original name of the Channel 3 service for the north of Scotland founded in 1961 and now named STV.

The name Grampian Television was retired in 2006 and the channel is known as STV on-air.

Grampian Television planned to launch on 1 October 1961 and had already bought and converted their studios for the start date.

At the time of launch, Grampian Television served a potential audience of 332,000 people in 98,000 homes.

Whereas Grampian Television had previously restricted its output to news and current affairs beforehand, production controller James Buchan decided to go for broke and branch out to produce light entertainment and music shows - such programming would remain a staple of the station's local output for the next forty years or so.

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Towards the end of the decade, the station's potential audience reached a million viewers and Grampian Television was employing just over 200 staff at their studios in Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh.

Grampian Television was slower than most other ITV stations to begin colour broadcasting which, after the company invested £180,000 in new equipment, promptly started in September 1971—an occasion timed to mark their 10th anniversary on air.

The most notable of these came in 1978 when Grampian became the first British television station to replace 16mm film cameras with Electronic News Gathering [ENG] video cameras for news coverage - a move which finally allowed its regional news programme Grampian Today to extend from three to five nights a week.

Grampian Television developed its own outside broadcast unit, initially using studio equipment.

Six years later, Grampian Television won another eight-year franchise, effective of January 1982.

The only change made to the licence was the classification of the franchise as North and North East Scotland, as opposed to North East Scotland - a change which the station had already capitalised upon in January 1980 when Grampian Television Today was relaunched as North Tonight as part of a major expansion for Grampian Television's news operation.

Border pulled out of Scot FM a year later, before Grampian Television sold it off in July 1996 to the Independent Radio Group for £5.

Grampian Television contributed to Channel 4 in the form of various documentary series including Oil, The Blood is Strong, Alternative Energy and Scotland the Grave.

Station was criticised by the Independent Grampian Television Commission concerning the amount and relevance of its non-news regional output with more and more programming being produced from outside the region, chiefly in Glasgow - local production was gradually phased out with the station's final non-news programme broadcast in 2008.

Decision to rebrand Grampian Television was met with much criticism from across the former Grampian Television region - the move was viewed by many as similar to the ITV plc-owned licences in England, Wales and Southern Scotland where all of the regions are branded as ITV1.

In June 2003, Grampian Television moved to new, smaller, state-of-the-art all digital studios at Craigshaw Business Park in West Tullos, Aberdeen, some of the most advanced in the world at the time of opening.

Grampian Television had a studio in Edinburgh, despite it being in Scottish's franchise area, which had closed by 1969, and a new £4 million studio complex in Stornoway, opened in the September 1990 to facilitate an expansion in Scottish Gaelic language output, including the daily news bulletin Telefios.

However, this colourful and dynamic ident was only to last four years, as Grampian Television adopted the first ITV generic look from September 1989 until October 1998 - the longest usage of the generic ident by any ITV company.

An expanded archive of selected factual and entertainment output from Grampian Television continues to be uploaded to the STV Player's YouTube channel.